British Telecommunications Public Limited Company

British Telecommunications Corporation

Richard Weeks

Nicholas John Davies

Uwe Krohn

Phil Graeme Flavin

Mike Charles Revett

Lee Michael Stephens

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

In order to reduce problems caused by a user corrupting memory by incorrect use of memory allocation functions in the C programming language, memory allocation requests of an application ( ) are monitored by a monitor sub-process ( ) during run-time, and invalid memory allocation requests are detected and the application interrupted by the monitor sub-process. Additionally, an allocator sub-process ( ) external to the application performs the memory allocation requests to shield the memory from user errors. A start-up dialog ( ) synchronises the application ( ) and allocator ( ), and the allocator maintains during run-time a memory segment ( ) conforming to the memory ( ) allocated to the application.

Apparatus and method for allocating memory space for program use and management purposes

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 method and apparatus is provided for extracting key terms from a data set, the method includes identifying a first set of one or more word groups of one or more word that occur more than once in the data set, and removing from this first set a second set of word groups that are sub-strings of longer word groups in the first set. The remaining word groups are key terms. Each word group is weighted according to its frequency of occurrence within the data set. The weighting of any word group may be increased by the frequency of any sub-string of words occurring in the second set and then dividing each weighting by the number of words in the word group. This weighting process operates to determine the order of occurrence of the word groups. Prefixes and suffixes are also removed from each word in the data set. This produces a neutral form of each word so that the weighting values are prefix and suffix independent.

Information management and retrieval

A system for summarizing data sets stores target data items and divides the data set into sections. Each section is compared against the target data items and a ranking value is calculated for each section dependent on the outcome of the comparisons. A summary of the data set is then compiled from sections having a ranking value past a pre-determined threshold value.

Method and apparatus for creating a customized summary of text by selection of sub-sections thereof ranked by comparison to target data items

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

Felixstowe, United Kingdom

Richard Weeks