Method and apparatus for electronically extracting application specific multidimensional information from documents selected from a set of documents electronically extracted from a library of electronically searchable documents

Abstract

An apparatus and method is disclosed for providing application specific multi-dimensional information to an application running on a user computing device, wherein at least one dimension of the information is a category, from a plurality of member documents electronically extracted from a library of electronically searchable documents, which may comprise an application specific multidimensional information extractor adapted to extract occurrences of prospective representations of dimensions of application specific multidimensional information from the member documents, and to extract occurrences of non-application specific multidimensional information from the member documents; and, an encoder adapted to encode the occurrences of prospective dimensions of application specific multidimensional information and non-application specific multidimensional information contained in member documents according to a dimension specific coded representation of each dimension of application specific multidimensional information and a non-application specific coded representation of each non-application specific multidimensional information element. The apparatus and method may further comprise a member document identifier adapted to determine whether a member document contains coded formatting, and if not, whether the member document is a dense document, and if not, for rejecting the document from further processing, and the coded formatting may comprise network markup language coding. The apparatus and method may further comprise an application specific multidimensional information verification unit adapted verify the extraction of application specific multi-dimensional information from the member documents, and may further comprise a database for storing the application specific multi-dimensional information adapted to provide an application running on a user computing device access to the application specific multidimensional information. The application specific multidimensional information may be scheduled events having the dimensions of time, location and event identity, and the application running on the user computer can be an electronic calendar or other similar scheduling software program.

Description

[0001] This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 026,065, filed Dec. 19, 2001, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] The present invention relates to the field of electronic searching of libraries of searchable documents, for example, pages of documents maintained on web-pages accessible over a communication network, e.g., the Internet, in order to extract application specific multi-dimensional data. RELATED APPLICATIONS [0003] The present application is related to concurrently filed applications by the same inventors, assigned to the same assignee the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated reference. SOFTWARE SUBMISSION [0004] Accompanying this Application as an Appendix thereto and incorporated by reference herein as is fully incorporated within this Application is a media copy of the software currently utilized by the applicants in the implementation of some or all of the presently preferred embodime...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

This solution enables efficient and accurate extraction of application-specific event information, reducing user effort by automating the collection and categorization process, providing a finer match with user interests and eliminating irrelevant information.

Problems solved by technology

Yet, for all its power, searching libraries of searchable documents containing relevant information, e.g., web-pages on the Internet for interesting events that fit the user's time and location constraints, can still require too much effort and frustration on the part of the user, especially if the user's interests singularly or collectively do not fit the relatively few categories available on any single web-site or even a relatively few web-sites.

Trying to answer this question today requires a lot of energy and time visiting multiple search engines and following links.

They do not, however, have the ability to push events to users based on their interests.

This severely limits the scope of event information available from these sites.

Because of the manual compilation and scaling issues, the categories are necessarily broad and limited to the most popular ones.

Existing content-oriented, e.g. event-oriented, Web information services have not shown the ability to exploit the full power of the Internet.

From a commercial perspective, multiple event- and calendar-oriented web-sites and services have been developed in response to the need for event tracking software, but they lack automatic scheduled-event compilation.

However, when.com's approach suffers from the manual compilation limitations discussed above.

They also have limitations similar to when.com.

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