Kaboodle, Inc.

Keiron McCammon

Manish Chandra

An extraction manager extracts information from formatted input. The input is annotated with presentation information, and parsed into a set of elements comprising a canonical representation thereof. An information analyzer analyzes the elements in order to glean additional information. An entity extractor determines entities to extract from the input. The entity extractor analyzes elements according to specific entities to be extracted, and creates entity specific observations for analyzed elements. These observations comprise possible values for the relevant entities. A heuristics processor maintains a collection of entity specific heuristics, each comprising a test to help determine the suitability of data as a value for the corresponding entity. The heuristics processor selects heuristics for the entities to be extracted, and tests observations for these entities against the selected heuristics. Responsive to this testing, ordered possible values for entities to extract are determined.

Extracting information from formatted sources

An attribute manager extracts attribute values from formatted data. The attribute manager maintains information concerning a plurality of attributes, such as matching names and values for attributes. Formatted data is parsed into a plurality of elements comprising a canonical representation of the data, independent of the data format. The formatted data can be, for example, a web page, a portable document format document or a word processor document. The attribute manager scans the elements for occurrences of attribute values. Based upon value occurrence distribution and frequency within the data, and maintained information concerning attributes, the attribute manager infers occurrence of specific attributes in the formatted data and assigns the most appropriate occurring values to the specific attributes. In some embodiments, the attribute manager stores attributes and their assigned values, and uses this information to automatically prepare summaries of input data.

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Danville, CA, United States of America

Keiron McCammon