System and method for creating and editing, an on-line publication

• US 7,086,002 B2
• Filed: 09/27/1999
• Issued: 08/01/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 09/27/1999
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Weitzman, Louis, Elo, Sara
• Primary Examiner(s): Feild, Joseph
• Assistant Examiner(s): DESAI, RACHNA SINGH
• Application Number:
  US09/404,163
• Publication Number:
  US 20030204814A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,500 Days
• Field of Search: 715/530, 715/517, 715/513, 715/523
• US Class Current: 715/234
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/972 Access to data in other repository systems, e.g. legacy data or dynamic Web page generation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/143 Markup, e.g. Standard Generalized Markup Language [SGML] or Document Type Definition [DTD]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/151 Transformation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/186 Templates
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/221 Parsing markup language streams streaming G06F40/149
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/295 Named entity recognition

Abstract

A system and method automatically generate an on-line document from raw text into an engaging, interactive form for a plurality of viewers. Unstructured articles are read from an information feed. A computation process extracts and tags proper names of people, products, organizations, and places and categorizes them. An image database is used to link these proper names with image files. The image database consists of a series of attribute-value pairs for active searching of names. A URL query string is input to the database to extract the location of the image in the database file system. An Extensible Markup Language (XML) file is created from the raw text of the article, the list of proper names in the processed data and the image file references. The XML file is stored in a file system. An Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) file provides templates containing computational relationships between the text and images. The XML and XSL style sheets are combined to generate a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) file containing an on-line story of the unstructured articles in a Java Applet which allows the system to provide a variety of interactive behaviors for a final presentation available by a viewer from a browser.

Claims

1. A method of creating a dynamic representation from data received from an information source, comprising the steps of:

storing the data received from the information source;

identifying at least one text instance in the data using a text processing module;

finding one or more images in an image database module relating to the at least one text instance;

selecting at least one image from the one or more found images to display with the data, comprising the steps of;

identifying a number of unique text instances with associated images in the data;

comparing the number of unique text instances with a minimum number and terminating the method if the number of unique text instances is less than the minimum number;

storing the number of unique text instances in a temporary structure;

ranking the unique text instances by their frequency in the data;

processing paragraphs of the data beginning with the paragraph having the most unique text instances;

indicating in a document object that an image corresponding to the most frequent unique text instance in a paragraph will be displayed in the dynamic representation of the paragraph; and

grouping paragraphs into sections, wherein two consecutive paragraphs are grouped together if one paragraph has a unique text instance and an image link so that each section has a unique text instance and an image to display; and

generating the dynamic representation of the data from the at least one selected image and the data.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the generating step further comprises:

transforming the data and the at least one selected image into an Extensible Markup Language (XML) object saved to an XML file in a storage disk;

creating at least one Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) style sheet in a storage disk; and

combining an XSL style sheet with the XML file to produce a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) file representing a dynamic representation of the data.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the data comprises an article title and body.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the data comprises an HTML document.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the data comprises a digital news feed.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of identifying at least one text instance comprises the step of identifying an offset and a length of each text instance occurrence.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of storing data comprises the step of receiving data as a compressed collection of files via a file transfer protocol.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of identifying at least one text instance comprises the step of identifying proper names in the data.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of identifying at least one text instance comprises the step of providing a canonical form and a category of each text instance.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of identifying the at least one text instance comprises the steps of:

translating identifying information into an XML text buffer, wherein each text instance is converted into tagged elements in the data; and

creating a document object from the XML text buffer, wherein the object comprises the data and the at least one text instance.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of finding images comprises the steps of:

sending a query in the form of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) string to the image database module; and

generating a list of elements matching the query in the image database module, wherein each element comprises a URL to an image file stored in the file system.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein, in the step of combining paragraphs of the data into sections, each section defines a state in the dynamic representation, and each section comprises at least one paragraph and a single image corresponding to a text instance.

13. The method of claim 2, wherein, in the step of transforming the data and images, the XML file comprises elements needed by an XSL style sheet to construct HTML into a dynamic representation.

14. The method of claim 2, wherein each XSL style sheet represents a different layout.

15. An apparatus for creating a dynamic representation from data received from an information source, the apparatus comprising:

a memory; and

at least one processor coupled to the memory and operative to;

(i) store the data received from the information source in a file system;

(ii) identify at least one text instance using a text processing module;

(iii) find one or more images in an image database module relating to the at least one text instance;

(iv) select at least one image from the one or more found images to display with the data, comprising the operations of;

(a) identifying a number of unique text instances with associated images in the data;

(b) comparing the number of unique text instances with a minimum number and terminating the method if the number of unique text instances is less than the minimum number;

(c) storing the number of unique text instances in a temporary structure;

(d) ranking the unique text instances by their frequency in the data;

(e) processing paragraphs of the data beginning with the paragraph having the most unique text instances;

(f) indicating in a document object that an image corresponding to the most frequent unique text instance in a paragraph will be displayed in the dynamic representation of the paragraph; and

(g) grouping paragraphs into sections, wherein two consecutive paragraphs are grouped together if one paragraph has a unique text instance and an image link so that each section has a unique text instance and an image to display; and

(v) generate the dynamic representation of the data from the at least one selected image and the data.

16. An article of manufacture for creating a dynamic representation from data received from an information source, comprising a machine readable medium containing one or more programs which when executed implement the steps of:

storing the data received from the information source in a file system;

identifying at least one text instance in the data using a text processing module;

finding image in one or more images in an image database module relating to the at least one text instance;

selecting at least one image from the one or more found images to display with the data, comprising the steps of;

identifying a number of unique text instances with associated images in the data;

comparing the number of unique text instances with a minimum number and terminating the method if the number of unique text instances is less than the minimum number;

storing the number of unique text instances in a temporary structure;

ranking the unique text instances by their frequency in the data;

processing paragraphs of the data beginning with the paragraph having the most unique text instances;

indicating in a document object that an image corresponding to the most frequent unique text instance in a paragraph will be displayed in the dynamic representation of the paragraph; and

grouping paragraphs into sections, wherein two consecutive paragraphs are grouped together if one paragraph has a unique text instance and an image link so that each section has a unique text instance and an image to display; and

generating a dynamic representation of the data from the at least one selected image and the data.