Situational web-based dashboard

Abstract

A method of assembling situational Web-based dashboard from a wide array of web pages, digital media and components with just a few clicks and no programming, so a user can view scattered information from disparate sources on a single web-based screen. The components that can be included into dashboard pages are: live-area components created on- demand from any sub-region of any web page or web application; any rich media component such as rich text, video, picture, widget; and any office document (Microsoft Office documents and PDF etc.). Each dashboard page can contain any number of components. The size, position, location and layout of the components in the dashboard can be easily configured using a computer mouse, or through a touch screen interface. Each component in the dashboard can do auto-refresh from the source with a specified time interval, which also prevents user session timeout for secured web sites. The resulting dashboard can also be shared with others for collaboration. A set of dashboard pages can also be bundle together, and automatically display in a slideshow mode on-screen to auto display and monitor large number of information.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]The present application claims priority to Provisional Application Ser. No. 61 / 190,611, filed Sep. 2, 2008, for “Component-level Visual Bookmarking for the Web,” and Provisional Application Ser. No. 61 / 190,612, filed Sep. 2, 2009, for “Situational Web Portal,” the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]The present invention relates to a method of componentizing any Web page, rich media or documents with just a few mouse-clicks and zero programming; then aggregating them in a situational Web-based dashboard user interface for at-a-glance view of multiple information from disparate web sites or sources; visually manipulating the components on the dashboard;[0003]auto-refreshing each component; and slide showing of a set of dashboard pages, all for more effective information viewing, presentation, monitoring, interaction and collaboration.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0004]There are numerous Web pages on the Internet a...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0015]One objective of the invention is to allow live information from different website or applications to be displayed on a single web-based dashboard page for easy and at-a-glance view of information from multiple web pages and information sources.

[0021]Each dashboard page can contain any number of components. The size, position, location and layout of the components in the dashboard can be easily configured using a computer mouse, or through a touch screen interface. The resulting dashboard can be used by the author only or shared with others with various permissions for group-based collaboration. Each component in the dashboard is capable of auto-refreshing itself from the source with a specified time interval. A set of dashboard pages can be bundle together, and automatically display in a slideshow mode on the screen to auto display and monitor large number of information.

[0027]The invention is a method and a user interface style that provides the users with the power, extensibility, flexibility and ease-of-use of componentizing any digital media content, Web page and Web application with just a few mouse clicks and zero programming; embedding any number of components into canvas-like Web-based dashboard pages; and then view, manage, interact and share them. The actual components that can be embedded is very generic with the invention, which includes any sub-region of any live web pages; any existing embeddable objects (picture, video or widget) from other web pages; and any photo, video or Office document in user's computer through an uploading process.

[0028]The resulting dashboard pages can contain both static content and live dynamic applications. The user does not need to go to each web site or open each rich media one-by-one. The at-a-glance view of multiple information pieces from different web sites and information sources at the same time adds significant value by delivering multiple information to users more effectively. The resulting dashboard pages can be used for publishing and sharing purpose, or for monitoring and display purpose. Furthermore, when combined with touch-screen user- interface, those situational dashboards can be a powerful way for presentation, interaction and collaboration.

Problems solved by technology

Mail Inbox, Facebook Status, Personal Bank Account balance, and a collaboration SharePoint team-space website in the Intranet, he / she needs to open each web site to do that, which is very inconvenient.

Web browsers do not have such capabilities.

The main drawback of the portal or personal-start-pages approaches used by My Yahoo, iGoogle, is that they rely on existing widgets provided by vendors, such as Yahoo or Google.

While there is a wide selection of widgets available for common consumer-oriented usages such as Email, Weather, Stock indices, games, RSS-feed based News, the selection is very limited and almost non-exist to access business web applications.

Consequently, it is not practical to pre-create all the widget components for all the users for all the cases.

First, it is only a link and does not communicate what's behind it, requiring the user to make many extra clicks to open each page in a new browser window to know what's in the website.

But when there is large number of bookmark entries a user needs to explore, those extra clicks and associated efforts can add up quickly.

Open each link one-by-one can be a lot of extra work, and in many cases becomes prohibitive for people even to open those pages.

Second, traditional bookmarking typically can only point to the URL of a web page (at page-level), but cannot point to a specified area / region (rectangular sub-region) of web page of interest (sub-region or component-level).

A significant number of such web pages use HTTP POST to make the Web request, which means the parameters are not visible in the Web URL of resulting page, thus makes it impossible to bookmark it directly.

This forces the user to re-enter the same parameters again and again for the same functionalities, and it is very inconvenient.

Yet, this is not the case for other types of content, such as Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.).

In both cases, they are not web-page native, which means that they cannot be easily embedded right inside a web page similar to a YouTube video, and not viewable until opened in an external viewer with extra clicks and context switch.

Images