International Business Machines Corporation

Ronald E Bingham

Michael J Dockter

Joel Frank Farber

Kevin D Seppi

Randal James Richardt

Michael Leon Pauser

Harry R Campbell

A system and method for allowing communication of a large number of parameters from a computer user to an application program with a relatively small amount of interaction. The system uses a plurality of graphical metaphors to represent a collection of known personality or collective knowledge representations to extract a computer user's preferences. A computer user expresses how much likeness exists between themselves and a set of metaphoric graphical objects which is translated into an intermediary format which enables the computer to provide a higher quality of pattern matching and differentiation.

Method of indirect specification of user preferences

A coherent method for the creating, capturing, and retrieving of ideas, concepts, data, and/or multi-media information The system establishes a framework in which knowledge can be represented. The system is a computer-based system which utilizes multimedia, databases, and mass storage to implement this framework. It has an architecture and an open-ended-set of functional elements that combine to support knowledge processing. Knowledge is created by uniquely identifying and interrelating heterogeneous datasets located locally on a user's workstation or dispersed across computer networks. By uniquely identifying and storing the created interrelationships, the datasets themselves need not be locally stored. Datasets may therefore be located, interrelated and accessed across computer networks. In addition, an almost unlimited number of relationships can be created and stored as knowledge to be selectively filtered and collected by the end user.

Method for association of heterogeneous information

A computer server for storing and managing a digitized generic form of multiple heterogeneously formatted data objects (e.g. multi-media files). The system uniquely identifies both the generic form of the data and a description relating the stored generic form to the original formatted data. Through the management of the unique identifiers a requester need only specify an identifier to quickly access a data object regardless of platform incongruencies, particular stored format, location or addressing structure (i.e. particular file path). Once identified and located the generic data object form is transformed into a format usable by the requestor.

Facility for the generic storage and management of multimedia objects

A computer token identification system uses a plurality of unique tokens to represent a plurality of items. The token architecture consists of a delimiter field, a version field, and a variable field. The delimiter field contains at least one token recognition character. The version field immediately follows the delimiter field and contains the version string of at least one character identifying a unique token version. The variable field immediately follows the version field and contains a variable string of at least one character conforming to a format specification for the token version. Each variable string is unique for a token version. The version string and variable string can be of varying lengths, and the characters of the version string and variable string that are adjacent are from different character set types.

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Capitola, CA, United States of America

Ronald E Bingham