System and method for visually representing the contents of a multiple data object cluster

Patent 6564202 Issued on May 13, 2003. Estimated Expiration Date:

October 19, 2019. Estimated Expiration Date is calculated based on simple USPTO term provisions. It does not account for terminal disclaimers, term adjustments, failure to pay maintenance fees, or other factors which might affect the term of a patent.

Abstract Claims Description Full Text

Patent References

Scatter-gather: a cluster-based method and apparatus for browsing large document collections
Patent #: 5442778
Issued on: 08/15/1995
Inventor: Pedersen, et al.

Information system and method for filtering a massive flow of information entities to meet user information classification needs
Patent #: 5867799
Issued on: 02/02/1999
Inventor: Lang, et al.

Prefetching and caching documents according to probability ranked need S list Patent #: 6098064
Issued on: 08/01/2000
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Inventors

Assignee

Xerox Corporation

Application

No. 421419 filed on 10/19/1999

US Classes:

707/2Access augmentation or optimizing

Examiners

Primary: Mizrahi, Diane D.
Assistant: Mofiz, Apu M

International Class

G06F 017/30

Abstract

A system and method for browsing, retrieving, and recommending information from a collection uses multi-modal features of the documents in the collection, as well as an analysis of users' prior browsing and retrieval behavior. The system and method are premised on various disclosed methods for quantitatively representing documents in a document collection as vectors in multi-dimensional vector spaces, quantitatively determining similarity between documents, and clustering documents according to those similarities. The system and method also rely on methods for quantitatively representing users in a user population, quantitatively determining similarity between users, clustering users according to those similarities, and visually representing clusters of users by analogy to clusters of documents.