Hewlett-packard Company

Simon J Form

Peter Michael Williams

Brian W McBride

Jonathan A Weiner

Ralph L Carpenter

Edmund F Davies

A method for accessing and using stored electronic documents. The stored documents are presented to the user in a manner which visually simulates document types that most users are familiar with, such as books. Each page of the document is divided into frames. Both the individual pages and the frames comprising them are ranked based on locational, representational and logical attributes. These rankings are called herein semantic hints. The user determines the review speed of the document, and that review speed in turn determines which frames and pages will be moved from memory into cache at any particular time, as well as determining which of the pages and frames will be either fully or partially rendered on the display.

Method for browsing electronically stored information

An object based data processing system comprising a plurality of storage domains arranged so that a semantic object in a second storage domain can be accessed by the user of a first storage domain by the creation of a new presentation object in the first storage domain which is linked via a transient communication link to the semantic object in the second storage domain. Each storage domain includes a global object into which the user of the storage domain can place objects to be made accessible to other storage domains and a distributed object containing the global objects of all other storage domains. By opening a distributed object in any storage domain, the user is given access to the global objects of other storage domains, including those of other users.

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Bristol, United Kingdom

Simon J Form