International Business Machines Corporation

Andrew James Flegg

Margaret Ann Ruth Beynon

Julian Lawrence Friedman

Megan A Beynon

Benjamin Peter Delo

Philipp Offermann

James Bell

There is described a method, system and computer program product for processing a link embedded in a link document in a client computer, said link comprises a URL reference for a URL document in the client computer or another computer, there being stored a record containing a link reference and an intended fingerprint, said intended fingerprint representing the content of the URL document associated with the URL of the link at the time of or after the link was created, said method comprising the steps of: fetching the intended fingerprint for the link; fetching the URL document; creating a current fingerprint of the fetched URL document; comparing the intended fingerprint and the current fingerprint; and identifying that the intended fingerprint and the current fingerprint are different in a material way. There is further described, on identifying that the intended fingerprint and current fingerprint are different in a material way and there being provided a database of current fingerprints and corresponding URLs, searching the current fingerprint database and locating current fingerprints that are similar to the intended fingerprint; choosing a current fingerprint that matches the intended fingerprint; and changing the URL of the link in link document to match the URL of the matched current fingerprint.

Guaranteeing hypertext link integrity

Mechanisms for generating a set of one or more elements of a fingerprint for a document, the document comprising a semantic construct having one or more ordered words, are provided. With these mechanisms, a range of sizes for a fingerprint element is defined and ordered words of the semantic construct are divided into a set of one or more mutually exclusive fingerprint elements. Each of the one or more mutually exclusive fingerprint elements includes a number of adjacent words, the number being within the range of sizes for a fingerprint element. Responsive to a determination that the set of mutually exclusive fingerprint elements excludes a word from the semantic construct, the excluded word is discarded.

Generating a fingerprint for a document

Growing community of inventors

Basingstoke, United Kingdom

Andrew James Flegg