International Business Machines Corporation

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ashok Malhotra

Stephen James Millet

Steven Jay Munroe

Alfred Lee

Elliot Lee Waingold

Johannes Christiaan Laffra

Vincent Joseph Kruskal

Kenneth J Perry

Luanne M Burns

Jeffery C Schlimmer

The present invention provide for an algebraic mapping of a policy expression from a compact to a normalized form, both in Boolean and set formulations. The policy algebra is defined in such a way that policy alternatives within the normalized expression will be the same across equivalent compact expressions&#x2014;regardless of how the assertions are arbitrarily constrained or what operators are used to constrain such equivalent expressions. Moreover, the present invention also provides a model for identifying alternatives that are equivalent by comparing only the root element names or QName of each assertion within an alternative. In addition, embodiments as described herein can utilize the identification of equivalent alternatives in order to create an intersection policy expression to limit alternatives of admissible behavior to those in common across both endpoints.

Policy algebra and compatibility model

The data structures, apparatus, methods, and mechanisms of the present invention cooperate to provide the user with a flexible multiple inheritance OOP environment. OOP environments comprise composite data structures and internal mechanisms for manipulating those structures. The structures are used to allow a user to realize the power of OOP. Hence, the layout of these structures, the way in which the structures inter-relate, and the manner in which they are built and used are all critical to the utility of a particular OOP environment. It is no surprise, then, that manufacturers and suppliers of OOP environments are constantly striving to design composite data structures and internal mechanisms which maximize user productivity. The composite data structures and organization of the MOM OOP environment provide significant benefits that are not provided by the multiple inheritance environments of the prior art. Of particular significance is the ability to add method programs to a class definition without the need to recompile the majority of the code base.

Multiple inheritance mechanism for an object oriented programming

Object-oriented system methods are automatically instrumented with method hooks that are capable of generating graphical information that can be visualized on a graphical interface. When a method hook is run, it can indicate the occurrence of: an object instance being created, and object instance being destroyed, an method being entered or a method being exited. In the event of one of these occurrences, the method hooks initiate execution of a monitoring function that uses the graphical information and a visualization script with rules to update a visualization shown on the graphical interface. The update will conform with the current state of the object instances visualized. The rules can be changed, to modify the visualization, without recompiling or relinking the application programs. Constraints also can be used by the monitoring function to modify the visualization.

System having automatic insertion of hooks into object-oriented software

An apparatus and method is disclosed for efficiently clustering program objects on a unit of storage in a secondary memory, e.g., a page of memory on a disc. The objects are clustered so that a set of queries (query set) can access the stored objects with a minimum number of page transfers from secondary storage to main memory. To determine how the objects are clustered together on each memory page, queries in the query set and the objects that they access are identified. The queries are ranked by a number of factors including the query weight, the memory space required to store objects accessed by a query, and the number of objects a query has in common with other queries. The objects accessed by the query set are clustered on secondary memory pages according to the query ranking. Partially packed memory pages can be combined to minimize the cost of the query set accessing the stored objects.

Storage clustering and packing of objects on the basis of query workload

Information is retrieved from a database using natural language (NL) queries and graphical interfaces and displays. A query is separated into tokens which are parsed into elements. The parsed elements are matched to a list of database names. If all the parsed elements can be uniquely matched to database names, a database query is constructed and used to query the database to retrieve information and to present to a user. However, when an ambiguous query is encountered, i.e. all of whose elements cannot be uniquely matched with database names, the understood components of the ambiguous query, i.e., those elements matching database names, are presented the user along with relationships of the elements to other names in the database so that the user can use an interface to explore the database by accessing and displaying this database information and these relationships. The interface can take the form of views on a graphical interface. Using the displayed information, the user can create associations between database names and components not understood in the query. In other words, database names can be associated with the natural language words or phrases. These associations are added to the system knowledge and used to respond to future queries. In this way, the system learns, i.e., by using the added associations the system is able to respond to queries that it was unable to respond in a satisfactory manner before the association was added.

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Croton-on-Hudson, NY, United States of America

Ashok Malhotra