British Telecommunications Public Limited Company

British Telecommunications Corporation

Nicholas John Davies

Richard Weeks

Nicholas J Kings

Paul F McKee

Cefn R Hoile

John P Wittgreffe

Ian Thurlow

Richard Thurlow

Blaz Fortuna

Marko Grobelnik

Uwe Krohn

Paul Mckee

Sandra Stincić-Clarke

An environment of sensors and actuators is operated in accordance with predetermined policies, and the effectiveness of individual policies is monitored by comparing inputs from the sensors () with intended outcomes from policies controlled by previous inputs from one or more of the same sensors. Each policy includes a check function (), wherein a sensor, other than the one that triggers the actions, monitors the actions generated by the policy and generates an output () indicative of whether a system state is approaching a condition specified by the policy.

Monitoring of distributed systems

In a managed system controlled by multiple policy managers, conflicts between the policies of the managers are resolved by generating a satisfaction measure to be transmitted to policy managers together with sensor data, indicative of how closely the sensor data satisfies the policy which caused it. This satisfaction measure is used to determine whether actuators controlled by the other policy managers should be triggered by the sensor data. This allows policies to co-operate to prevent conflict between the conflicting requirements of different policies.

Monitoring of distributed systems with measuring effectiveness of a first policy to derive a satisfaction measure

A data handling device has access to a store of existing metadata pertaining to existing documents having associated metadata terms. It analyses the metadata to generate statistical data as to the co-occurrence of pairs of terms in the metadata of one and the same document. When a fresh document is received, it is analysed to assign to it a set of terms and determine for each a measure of their strength of association with the document. Then, for each term of the set, a score is generated that is a monotonically increasing function of (a) the strength of association with the document and of (b) the relative frequency of co-occurrence of that term and another term that occurs in the set; metadata for the fresh document are then selected as the subset of the terms in the set having the highest scores.

Organising and storing documents

The present invention provides a method of operating a network comprising the steps of: analyzing a first datastore comprising data representing historical network performance; creating or more indices within the first datastore; creating one or more probability networks in accordance with one or more of the created indices; determining from the one or more probability networks a conditional probability associated with an alarm event; and' if the conditional probability determined is less than a threshold value, disregarding the associated alarm event; or if the conditional probability determined is greater than a threshold value, using the associated alarm event in conjunction with other historical network data to predict future alarm events.

Network analysis system

In a network of computers, e.g. the internet, each computer records the information sources it accesses, and these records are used to identify computers whose users share common interests, as indicated by the sources they access. A virtual network is created linking computers whose users have been identified as sharing similar interests data on what sources have been accessed by each user are shared with neighbouring computers, a defined by the virtual network. Computers can also pass on information on sources accessed received from one neighbour to other neighbours.

Computer network

According to the present invention, apparatus and methods are provided to enable a user to locate and retrieve sets of information relevant to search criteria specified in a search query submitted by the user. Search results include not only a list of information sets matching with the search criteria, but also the preserved structure of any tags used in annotating the information set according to a structured mark-up language such as XML. A user may select a tag from a presented list of the returned tag structures, and the apparatus lists those documents containing the selected tags. The list of tags is then adjusted to include the selected tag and any other of the returned tags contained in the listed documents. Further tag selection from the adjusted list leads to a further refinement of the listed documents, enabling the user to navigate the search results on the basis of tag information.

Information access

Methods and apparatus for identifying associated key words in a data set. Associated key words are identified by a parser which firstly operates to extract key words from a data set. These key words are then analyzed by the parser to identify which key words, if any, have an association as determined by a predefined set of rules. These rules are grammatical and include, for example, two key words both being nouns that occur one after the other without intervening low value words. A similar rule applies to nouns followed by verbs but does not extend to verbs followed by nouns. These rules allow terms and phrases such as &ldquo;information technology&rdquo; and &ldquo;wide area network&rdquo; to be identified as associated key words rather than as individual and unrelated key words.

Methods and/or systems for selecting data sets

A system for accessing information stored in a distributed information database provides a community of intelligent software agents. Each agent can be built as an extension of a known viewer for a distributed information system such as the Internet WorldWide Web. The agent is effectively integrated with the viewer and can extract pages by means of the viewer for storage in an intelligent page store. The text from the information system is abstracted and is stored with additional information, optionally selected by the user. The agent-based access system uses keyword sets to locate information of interest to a user, together with user profiles such that pages being stored by one user can be notified to another whose profile indicates potential interest. The keyword sets can be extended by use of a thesaurus.

Growing community of inventors

Colchester, United Kingdom

Nicholas John Davies