Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Masaki Hoshida

Yoshihiro Noguchi

Hideki Yasukawa

Tsuyoshi Ueno

Masato Ishikawa

Takao Isogawa

Mitsuhiro Sato

Fumiyuki Kato

Yutaka Tomioka

Hayashi Itou

To provide a system for processing program information in which the display structure of a program table can be freely changed in accordance with a requirement of or the taste of an audience, the system for processing program information is structured to include program information storage meansfor storing program information, and program table display meansfor two-dimensionally displaying a program table employing as the two axes, two attributesandselected from among all of the attributes that have been given to each piece of program information, to make the program table. For the audience, program tables of various constructions can be displayed on the display means at will and in respective program retrieval operations, a program table that is easy to use to search for a program can be obtained. An specific desired program can be found in a short time by selecting key word(s) related to each program and extracting them from the program or the like. This is useful for an audience member to make a plan of desired broadcasts for himself.

System for processing program information

An agent presentation apparatus for transmitting and receiving a message and operating based on a knowledge base and a rule base. In particular, where an agent for carrying out a user request uses knowledge of a knowledge description or an action description between agents and executes communication, for example. An agent can request a WWW page locally or remotely over a network to retrieve already existing contents and make a presentation that might include one or more of images, voice, and text along with the WWW page. The apparatus can also respond to user questions about the WWW page using the knowledge description and/or the action description, for example.

Agent presentation apparatus

A knowledge provider system is configured as a plurality of data servers connected via a data communication network, which function as respective knowledge provider agents in response to information request messages sent from users of the network. Each agent holds a script which contains a knowledge base, and data defining predetermined message formats for respective types of messages and predetermined content formats for respective types of message contents which can be handled by that agent. A message received by an agent is pattern-matched against the message formats, if it is thereby found to be an information request message the message content portion is pattern-matched against the predetermined content formats, and if that matching is successful, the subject for which information is requested is pattern-matched against the contents of the knowledge base, to find a set of information corresponding to that subject. If any of the pattern matching operations is not successful, the agent originates messages for successively propagating the content portion of that information request message to other agents via the network. Obtained information is then sent back to the originating agent and hence to the user.

Knowledge provider system and knowledge providing method utilizing plural knowledge provider agents which are linked by communication network and execute message processing using successive pattern matching operations

A hypertext document and anchor sentences of parent documents for the hypertext document are registered with an hypertext document identifier as document information for each of hypertext documents having reference relationships with each other. A user can refer to one hypertext document according to an anchor sentence of another hypertext document functioning as a parent document. Also, occurrence positions of one word in hypertext documents and parent documents are registered as word information for each of words. When a keyword is input, a plurality of particular hypertext documents and particular parent documents in which the keyword appears are specified according to the word information, one particular hypertext document and corresponding particular parent documents are unified to a unified hypertext document for each particular hypertext document, an occurrence frequency of the keyword in each unified hypertext document is calculated according to the document information, importance degrees of the unified hypertext documents are calculated as those of the particular hypertext documents according to the occurrence frequencies, and ranking of the particular hypertext documents are determined according to those importance degrees. Because the occurrence frequency is calculated by considering the parent documents, the particular hypertext documents can be appropriately ranked.

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Tokyo, Japan

Masaki Hoshida