Crawling databases for information
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsArshish Kapadia, Jonah Burke, R. Parke, Howard Crow
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A system facilitates the search engine to search for pieces of information in various databases and application documents without the need to know the specific protocols to communicate with the various databases and application documents, such as Microsoft Excel documents. Despite the multitude of possible protocols which a crawler would have to use to connect to the databases, the system includes a unifying application programming interface to unify the way to access pieces of information in the databases and application documents.
Claims20
A system for exploring diverse databases for information, comprising:
- unifying data structures stored in a computer-readable medium for enumerating a set of databases to be explored and filters for constraining the information to be returned;
- a unifying application programming interface stored in another computer-readable medium for transforming protocols for communicating with the set of databases into one protocol;
- and
- a crawler using the one protocol to invoke a method described in the unifying data structures to explore desired pieces of information in the set of databases without knowing the protocol specific to each database in the set of databases.
A computer-readable medium having a data structure stored thereon for enhancing a process for crawling for pieces of information in diverse databases, the data structure comprising:
- a system field that is indicative of a database to be explored by a crawler, an entity field that is indicative of a meaning to be imparted to pieces of information stored in the database, a method that is indicative of an invokable piece of logic for finding instances of the entity field in the database, a parameter field that is indicative of a variable to be populated by a value, and a filter field that is indicative of an annotation to constrain the pieces of information to be returned via the invocation of the method.
A computer-implemented method for exploring databases and application documents for desired pieces of information, the method comprising:
- crawling for desired pieces of information by accessing unifying data structures to explore each entity under each database by invoking a finder method with one or more filters, each filter constraining the pieces of information to be returned;
- and
- receiving a selection when a user selects a hyperlink, the hyperlink being associated with an identifier to obtain pieces of information in one or more databases pertaining to an entity associated with the identifier.
A computer-readable medium having instructions stored thereon for implementing a computer-implemented method for exploring databases and application documents for desired pieces of information, the method comprising:
- crawling for desired pieces of information by accessing unifying data structures to explore each entity under each database by invoking a finder method with one or more filters, each filter constraining the pieces of information to be returned;
- and:
- receiving a selection when a user selects a hyperlink, the hyperlink being associated with an identifier to obtain pieces of information in one or more databases pertaining to an entity associated with the identifier.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.