System for providing document change information for a community of users

• US 6,681,369 B2
• Filed: 05/05/1999
• Issued: 01/20/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 05/05/1999
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Sony Corporation (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Xerox Corporation (Xerox Holdings Corp.)
• Inventors: Meunier, Jean-Luc, Glance, Natalie S., Arregui, Damian
• Primary Examiner(s): Shah, Sanjiv
• Application Number:
  US09/305,845
• Publication Number:
  US 20030167443A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,721 Days
• Field of Search: 707/511, 707/3, 707/5, 707/203, 715/511, 715/501.1
• US Class Current: 715/255
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/957 Browsing optimisation, e.g. caching or content distillation
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99953 Recoverability

Abstract

A document recommendation system incorporating a document change monitoring agent. For a document recommendation system to be effective, it is desirable to enable users to be cognizant of changes that may occur to the document. The present invention addresses this issue by coupling a document change monitoring agent, which automatically detects changes in referenced documents, with a recommender system, which helps users share and evaluate information in a collaborative way. One advantage of the invention is that it brings human judgement into the relevance evaluation of the detected changes and allows the results to be shared with other people likely to be interested, in such a way that redundant work is decreased. Another advantage of the invention is that it enables Systems Administrators of a document recommendation system to be more efficient in the management of the system.

Claims

1. A system for providing document change information to a community of users, comprising:

a document recommendation element for providing document recommendations to each user in the community of users based on a user profile;

document representation storage, for storing representations of said recommended documents;

a document registration element coupled to said document recommendation element, said document registration element for enabling users to identify a recommended document for which they would like to be notified of changes;

a document change monitoring element coupled to said document registration element, said document change monitoring element for detecting a change to said recommended document and reporting said change, having a type, to said document recommendation element; and

a user notification element coupled to said document recommendation element, said user notification element for notifying users in the community of users of said change when they registered with said document registration element to be notified of changes to said recommended document;

wherein said document recommendation element further comprises one or more action elements for responding to said change reported by said document change monitoring element;

each of said one or more action elements performing a different action related to said recommended document according to the type of said change; and

wherein one of said one or more action elements takes action responsive to a change in content of said recommended document, and wherein said action taken is to notify users of said recommended document of said change, to solicit feedback of said change, and to provide said feedback to other users of said recommended document in the community of users.

2. The system as recited in claim 1 wherein said feedback is made available to other users in the community of users not registered with said document registration element to be notified of changes to said recommended document upon their accessing the feedback.

3. The system as recited in claim 2 wherein one of said one or more action elements takes action responsive to a change in recommended document location, and wherein said action is to modify location information for said recommended document in said document representation storage.

4. The system as recited in claim 3 wherein one of said one or more action elements takes action responsive to a determination that said recommended document has become unavailable;

and wherein said action taken is to notify a systems administrator or the user who recommended said document.

5. The system as recited in claim 3 wherein one of said one or more action elements takes action responsive to a determination that there exist duplicate references to said recommended document, and wherein said action taken is to modify location information for said recommended document in said document representation storage to reflect the multiple references.

6. The system as recited in claim 3 wherein said feedback solicited includes one of ignoring the change and stop monitoring the recommended document.

7. In a system for managing document recommendations to a community of users, said documents contained in a collection of network accessible documents, a method for providing document change information responsive to instances of change of said documents, said method comprising:

a) input from users in the community of users indicating to said system that they would like to be notified of a change to a recommended document;

b) said system registering said recommended document with a monitoring agent, said monitoring agent for detecting changes to network accessible documents;

c) said monitoring agent indicating to said system that a change to said recommended document has occurred;

d) said system taking an appropriate action according to a type of change to said recommended document;

e) said system being adapted to notify users in the community of users of said change when they registered with said document registration element to be notified of changes to said recommended document;

wherein said type of change to said recommended document is a change in content of said recommended document, and wherein said action taken is to notify users of said recommended document of said change, to solicit feedback of said change, and to provide said feedback to other users of said recommended document in the community of users.

8. The method as recited in claim 7 wherein said type of change to said recommended document is a relocation of said document and said appropriate action is to change document representation information for said recommended document to reflect said relocation.

9. The method as recited in claim 7 wherein said feedback solicited includes one of ignoring the change and stop monitoring the recommended document.

10. The method as recited in claim 9 wherein said type of change to said recommended document is a determination that said recommended document has become unavailable;

and wherein said action taken is to notify a systems administrator or the user who recommended said document.

11. The method as recited in claim 9 wherein said type of change to said recommended document is a determination that there exist duplicate references to said recommended document, and wherein said action taken is to modify location information for said recommended document in said document representation storage to reflect the multiple references.

12. The method as recited in claim 9 wherein said feedback provided by a user specifies that said recommended document is no longer of interest to the user;

in the event no other user in the community of users is subscribed to be notified of changes to said recommended document, said system halting monitoring of changes by said monitoring agent to said recommended document.

13. A method for obtaining evaluations of changes in resources accessible to a community of users of a system, the system including:

resource access circuitry for accessing a set of resources;

user notification data indicating, for each of a subset of the resources, one or more users in the community of users to be notified when a change in a resource in the subset of the resources is detected; and

evaluation data indicating user evaluations of resources;

the method comprising;

(a) using the resource access circuitry to automatically attempt to access one of the resources in the subset and to automatically obtain access result data indicating a change to the one of the resources;

(b) automatically applying a change notification criterion to the access result data to obtain notification data indicating whether to notify users in the community of users that the resource is changed;

(c) if the notification data indicate that users in the community of users should be notified that the resource is changed, automatically notifying users indicated for the resource by the user notification data that the resource is changed and soliciting users indicated for the resource by the user notification data for evaluations of the resource as changed;

(d) receiving evaluations of the resource as changed from the notified users; and

(e) in response to the received evaluations, automatically updating the evaluation data to indicate user evaluations of the resource as changed and providing the received evaluations of the resource as changed to the users in the community of users indicated for the resource by the user notification data.

14. The method of claim 13 in which the resource access circuitry includes a network and the resource is a network-accessible document.

15. The method of claim 14 in which the network is the Internet and (a) comprises:

providing a universal resource location (URL) for the resource over the network.

16. The method of claim 13 in which the access result data indicate whether the resource'"'"'s location is changed and in which the change notification criterion does not require notification if the only change in the resource is a change in location.

17. The method of claim 16 in which the system further includes location data for the resource and in which, if the access result data indicate that the resource'"'"'s location is changed, the method further comprises:

updating the location data to indicate the changed location.

18. The method of claim 13 in which the access result data indicate whether the resource'"'"'s content is changed and in which the change notification criterion requires notification if the resource'"'"'s content is changed.

19. The method of claim 13 in which the access result data indicate whether the resource is available and in which the change notification criterion does not require notification if the only change in the resource is a change in availability.

20. The method of claim 13 in which the received evaluations provided by a user are made available to other users in the community of users not indicated for the resource by the user notification data upon their accessing the feedback.