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:
Jul. 21, 2009
Filed:
Aug. 19, 2004
David C. Kline, Bothell, WA (US);
Michael G. Boilen, Kirkland, WA (US);
David C. Kline, Bothell, WA (US);
Michael G. Boilen, Kirkland, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
In order to facilitate automated operations with software, semantic meaning of data values is bound to the syntactic type of the data values. In a described implementation, a piece of software accepts inputs and produces outputs. The inputs have a specified syntactic type (e.g., runtime type) and an expected semantic meaning. The semantic meaning corresponds to a real-world description of relevant data for the input. Providing a data set that matches the specified syntactic type and the expected semantic meaning as input to the software enables a relevant operation with the software to be performed. An example automated operation is the testing of a piece of software. In another described implementation, a synmantic data object is created and/or utilized that includes a syntactic type attribute and a semantic meaning attribute for the contained data value(s). Other optional attributes include locale indication and a validity flag.