System for software source code comparison

• US 7,568,109 B2
• Filed: 09/13/2004
• Issued: 07/28/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 09/11/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: IPX, Inc.
• Original Assignee: IPX, Inc.
• Inventors: Powell, G. Edward Jr., Lane, Mark T., White, N. Edward, Anderer, Michael
• Primary Examiner(s): Barron, Jr.; Gilberto
• Assistant Examiner(s): SAN JUAN, MARTINJERIKO P
• Application Number:
  US10/938,844
• Publication Number:
  US 20050216898A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,779 Days
• Field of Search: 726/32
• US Class Current: 713/187
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/80 of semi-structured data, e.g. markup language structured data such as SGML, XML or HTML content-based retrieval of web data G06F16/95
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2216/11 Patent retrieval
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/194 Calculation of difference between files
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/36 Software reuse

Abstract

A system for analyzing similarities between a first and second corpus or between a set of concepts and a corpus uses natural language processing and machine intelligence methods to replace terms or phrases in the corpus with concepts, determine the frequency of each concept in the corpus, and convert the corpus into a concept frequency file to enable easy comparison of the two corpuses or easy retrieval of items from the corpus that contain concept. Difference analysis and a combination of content and spectral analysis may be employed.

Claims

1. A system for comparing at least a first corpus to a second corpus, comprising:

an analyzer identifying concepts in the corpuses, said analyzer determining a frequency rating of each of said concepts in each corpus;

for each corpus, replacing each instance of each of said concepts with its respective determined frequency rating to create a frequency file; and

a comparator comparing the frequency file for the first corpus to the frequency file for the second corpus,

wherein said comparing the frequency file for the first corpus to the frequency file for the second corpus further comprises comparing portions of one corpus against the other corpus.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising an encryption engine respectively encrypting the first corpus and the second corpus using a one-way transform, and wherein the analyzer is an analyzer identifying concepts in the encrypted corpuses.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein said encryption engine, analyzer, and comparator are computer programs running on at least one general purpose computer.