The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 13, 1996
Filed:
Dec. 07, 1994
Joseph W Marks, Belmont, MA (US);
Stuart M Shieber, Cambridge, MA (US);
Rebecca P Hwa, Cambridge, MA (US);
Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America, Inc., Cambridge, MA (US);
Abstract
Apparatus for determining the structure of a hypermedia document containing ext and graphics that are to be laid out on several linked pages includes a system that specifies the assignment of text and graphics to pages and the links between the pages via a reduction to graph partitioning and the use of optimization techniques for graph partitioning. In one embodiment, display items and relations between these display items are listed along with a measure of their importance. These factors are captured in terms of numeric weights for edges between nodes in the associated graph to permit the system to assign display items to pages, and determine which pages should be linked, so that a user can move between pages in the most efficient manner. In a further embodiment, to accommodate limited display area that restricts the number of display items and page links that can be displayed simultaneously, the system can take into account multistage page moves that allow the user to access display items on different pages in sequence by moving from one page to another via links on other pages, through the use of 'stepping-stone' nodes in the associated graph that record possible traversal routes in the document that are not represented in other formulations of the hypermedia-document-layout task.