Oracle International Corporation

Oracle America, Inc.

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Jeffrey H Alexander

Stephen Joseph Green

Paul B Lamere

Douglas Eck

Seth T Proctor

Karl R Haberl

François Maillet

Bernard Horan

Meaningful words or phrases may be extracted from the information and used as tags. Weights may be determined for the tags, and tag clouds may be generated for the items. The tag clouds may be stored to a data store. Information specifying a tag cloud may be received. Recommended items for which the tag clouds most closely match the specified tag cloud may be identified. Standard vector space distance calculations, for example the cosine distance between the tag clouds, may be used to determine cloud similarity. The results may be filtered to optimize relevance, novelty and familiarity in accordance with preferences of the user. The recommended items may be displayed to a user interface. Users may interact with the user interface to steer the recommendations towards more relevant content.

Method and apparatus for generating recommendations from descriptive information

A system performs search and retrieval. The system monitors one or more user interface ('UI') fields configured to receive text input in a UI. The system determines that the one or more UI fields are being used to enter a textual description, and performs a search on a knowledge base based on document similarity to identify documents that are similar to a portion of the textual description that has already been entered in the one or more UI fields. The system then provides one or more of the documents in a UI field of the UI, and repeats the monitoring, the determining, the performing, and the providing.

Knowledge base search and retrieval based on document similarity

Systems, methods, and other embodiments associated with generating suggested shortcuts are described. In one embodiment, a method includes identifying a user that accesses an intranet portal and tracking navigation paths taken by the user within the intranet portal. The navigation paths are stored in a user profile associated with the user, where the navigation paths indicate a sequence of visited locations and a destination location for the sequence. When the user visits a location within the intranet portal, a list of suggested destination locations are generated as navigation shortcuts to allow the user to directly access a desired destination.

Personalized navigation shortcuts

Method and apparatus for transparent, steerable recommendations. A steerable recommender uses tag clouds including descriptive tags and associated weights to generate recommendations. Users may dynamically interact with the recommender via a user interface to steer the recommendations. A tag cloud for an item is displayed, items for which associated tag clouds are most similar to the displayed tag cloud are identified, and the items are displayed as recommendations. The strength of similarity of the items to the displayed tag cloud may be displayed. The user may modify a tag cloud, for example by changing the weight of a tag or by adding or removing a tag, and the recommendations may be automatically updated to reflect the modification. A recommended item may be selected to display the tag cloud corresponding to the item. A user may select a user interface element to request information on why a particular item was recommended.

Method and apparatus for user-steerable recommendations

Example embodiments herein include an audio manager that identifies at least one user in a social environment (e.g., multiplayer gaming environment). Each user in the social environment has a respective user music profile that contains audio attributes for various types of audio. The audio manager combines the user music profile from each user to form a group music profile. The audio manager further identifies a selection of audio segments to be rendered in the social environment that match the group music profile. Additionally, the audio manager processes the selection of audio segments against the audio attributes of at least one user to determine an audio segment to be rendered in the social environment. In one embodiment, the audio manager processes the selection of audio segments in accordance with a social value metric. In turn, the audio manager renders the audio segment in the social environment in accordance with the social value metric.

Audio processing in a social environment

A resource analyzer selects a resource (e.g., document) from a grouping of resources. The grouping of resources can be any type of social tagging system used for information retrieval. The selected resource has an assigned uncontrolled tag and an assigned controlled tag. The controlled tag is a term derived from a controlled vocabulary of terms. Having selected the resource for analyzing, the resource analyzer identifies a first set of resources in the grouping of resources having also been assigned a same value as the uncontrolled tag as the selected resource. Similarly, the resource analyzer identifies a second set of resources in the grouping of resources having also been assigned a same value as the controlled tag. With this information, the resource analyzer then produces a comparison result indicative of a similarity between the first set of resources and the second set of resources.

Growing community of inventors

Arlington, MA, United States of America

Jeffrey H Alexander