Palo Alto Research Center Inc.

Barbara Stefik

Mark Jeffrey Stefik

Stuart Kent Card

Ed H Chi

Lichan Hong

Techniques are described that provide a reading pane for reading one or more content portions of a work and a guide pane that displays a structured overview of additional information from the corpus that is focused by an analysis of information from the currently-visible content portion of the work. The contents of the currently-visible content portion displayed within the reading page are used to derive dynamic representations of the user's immediate interests. At the user's request, a structured persistent context-aware guide is computed and displayed. The persistent context-aware guide provides a framework for accessing other parts of the corpus having the most-related information. The elements in the persistent context-aware guide are other content portions or other organizations such as sections, chapters, or articles in the corpus. The persistent context-aware guide may also incorporate additional closely-related information elements from outside the corpus including advertisements. Advertisements for information on the topics of immediate interest to the user can be incorporated within the structured, context-aware guide so that the reader can purchase them and review that information in the context of the current session. The guide pane and the reading pane support navigation controls so that the user can go to new or previous sub-portions of the content portion, new or previous content portions and/or new or previous persistent context-aware guides.

Systems and methods for persistent context-aware guides

A system and method for providing orientation into subject areas of digital information for augmented communities is provided. Topics are provided for subject areas. Each subject area is associated with an augmented community and each topic is hierarchically organized under a fine-grained topic category. Evergreen indexes are maintained and includes topic models that are each matched to topics associated with each augmented community. Interrelatedness of the evergreen indexes is determined by identifying the topics found in the topic hierarchy for each evergreen index that are shared. A social network including neighbors made up of each augmented community associated with each interrelated evergreen index is formed. A user interest is determined and each of the plurality of topic models for the evergreen indexes is evaluated against the digital information. Access to the digital information via the identified best matched evergreen index and the identified other evergreen index is provided.

System and method for providing orientation into subject areas of digital information for augmented communities

A system and method for providing orientation into digital information is provided. A plurality of evergreen indexes for subject areas are maintained. The evergreen indexes include digital information and are each organized by topics that include a topic model matched to the digital information. A user interest within the digital information is determined. The topic models for the evergreen indexes are evaluated against the user interest and those topics models that best match the user interest are identified. Access to the digital information is provided via at least one of the topic models in at least one of the evergreen indexes.

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Portola Valley, CA, United States of America

Barbara Stefik