Dynamically linking relevant documents to regions of interest

• US 8,635,228 B2
• Filed: 11/16/2009
• Issued: 01/21/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 11/16/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Terrago Technologies Incorporated (In-Q-Tel)
• Original Assignee: Terrago Technologies Incorporated (In-Q-Tel)
• Inventors: Shahabi, Cyrus, Knoblock, Craig A., Kapoor, Dipsy, Chen, Ching-Chien
• Primary Examiner(s): LE, UYEN T
• Application Number:
  US12/619,554
• Publication Number:
  US 20110119265A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,527 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 707/748
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/38 Retrieval characterised by using metadata, e.g. metadata not derived from the content or metadata generated manually
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9537 Spatial or temporal dependent retrieval, e.g. spatiotemporal queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/00 Commerce

Abstract

Document relevance is determined with respect to a region of interest (ROI). A set of location references may be associated with a set of documents. The system selects location references associated with an ROI and then selects documents corresponding to the selected location references. The selected documents can be reported or processed further. A document-location reference index can be accessed when the present system is ‘online’ and processing a request for documents relevant to an ROI. The document-location reference index may be generated and updated while the present system is ‘offline’ and not processing a request for documents. The resulting relevant documents may be provided to a user in response to a document search associated with the ROI or along with an advertisement associated with the ROI.

Claims

1. A method for relating documents to a region of interest, the method comprising:

linking a plurality of location references stored in memory to a plurality of documents by a server, the linking including;

creating a location reference index which includes a location reference identifier for each location reference and a list of words within each location reference,

querying the location reference index using words retrieved from one or more of the plurality of documents, and

creating a document-location reference index using results from the query of the location reference index, records associated with each document of the document-location reference index including a document identifier, one or more location reference identifiers linked to the document, and a score for each location reference identifier linked to the document; and

processing a document request after the linking, the processing including;

selecting a sub-set of the plurality of location references associated with a region of interest,

querying the document-location reference index using each of the location references of the selected sub-set of location references and the score for the each of location references, and

selecting a subset of the plurality of documents associated with the sub-set of location references using results of the query of the document-location reference index.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein querying the document-location reference index further comprises:

removing duplicate documents; and

for each document in the query result, aggregating one or more of the scores for location reference identifiers linked to the document, and filtering documents using the aggregated scores.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein querying the location reference index is performed while linking a plurality of location references stored in memory to a plurality of documents by a server is not being performed.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein each record of the document-location reference index includes score for each location reference identifier having a word found in the document associated with the record.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the region of interest is received as text input.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the region of interest is received as a selected portion of an image.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the region of interest is a geographical region.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the selected location references have geographical positioning data corresponding to a position within the region of interest.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising determining a score for each document associated with a location reference within the region of interest.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein linking a plurality of location references stored in memory to a plurality of documents is performed offline and further comprises:

generating a score for each location reference for each document; and

for each document, aggregating the location reference scores for location references associated with the region of interest.

11. The method of claim 10, further comprising filtering the sub-set of the plurality of documents by the aggregated location reference scores.

12. The method of claim 10, further comprising selecting documents to receive an advertisement based on the aggregated location reference scores, the region of interest associated with the advertisement.

13. The method of claim 10, wherein processing a document request after the linking further comprises selecting documents to provide to a user based on the aggregated location reference scores, the region of interest associated with the user.

14. The method of claim 10, wherein processing a document request further comprises selecting documents to provide to a user based on an aggregated score for keyword scores associated with a user and the aggregated location reference scores, the region of interest associated with the user.

15. The method of claim 1, wherein the score for each location reference identifier is determined using frequency-inverse document frequency.

16. A non-transitory computer readable storage medium having a program embodied thereon, the program executable by processor to perform a method for relating documents to a region of interest, the method comprising:

linking a plurality of location references to a plurality of documents;

creating an index having a record for each document in the plurality of documents, each document record including a score for each location reference having a word found in the document associated with the record;

selecting a sub-set of the plurality of location references associated with a region of interest; and

selecting a subset of the plurality of documents associated with the sub-set of the plurality of location references.

17. The computer readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the region of interest is a geographical region.

18. The computer readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the selected location references have geographical positioning data corresponding to a position within the region of interest.

19. The computer readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the method further comprises:

determining a score for each document associated with a location reference within the region of interest; and

determining relevance scores for each document based on keywords in the document.

20. The computer readable storage medium of claim 19, wherein the method further comprises:

generating a score for each location reference for each document; and

for each document, aggregating the location reference scores for location references associated with the region of interest and aggregating the relevance scores of the keywords.

21. The computer readable storage medium of claim 19, wherein the method further comprises selecting documents to receive an advertisement based on the aggregated location reference scores, the region of interest associated with the advertisement.

22. The computer readable storage medium of claim 19, wherein the method further comprises selecting documents to provide to a user based on the aggregated location reference scores, the region of interest associated with the user.

23. A system for relating documents to regions of interest, comprising:

a query engine stored in memory and executable by a processor to query an index of linked documents and location references for documents linked to a subset of location references associated with a region of interest; and

a score generator stored in memory and executable by a processor to generate a score for each document, each document score based on the location references linked to the document and associated with the region of interest.