Systems and methods for tables of contents
AssigneeThomson Reuters Global Resources
InventorsJustin Wright, David Hendricksen, Darla Renae Agard
Life of this patent
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Abstract
To address problems related to use and formation of tables of contents, the present inventors, devised among other things, an exemplary table-of-contents (TOC) data structure and related systems and methods. One exemplary method entails associating a node from one TOC with a node of another TOC and then assigning a unique identifier to the associated pair of nodes. The unique identifier can then be used to logically define another TOC that includes portions of the two original TOCs. Another exemplary method entails tagging or associating nodes of a TOC with one or more view labels. (Identifiers for node relationships rather than the nodes themselves are tagged with the labels in some embodiments.)
Claims5
A method comprising:
- providing in memory a first table-of-contents (TOC) data structure including a plurality of parent nodes and a plurality of child nodes with each child node associated with one parent node to define a parent-child node pair, and each child node further associated with a document identifier uniquely identifying a document in a document collection;
- and
- defining in memory a second TOC data structure including a unique identifier in association with each parent-child node pair in the first TOC data structure.
A system comprising:
- a server for an online legal-research provider, the server coupled to one or more databases containing law-related documents;
- a client access device coupled to the server via the Internet and having a display for presenting a graphical user interface including one or more user-interface elements at least partially configured or defined by the server, wherein one or more of the elements allows the user to define and submit one or more legal-research queries;
- means associated with the server for returning search results to the client access device in response to a received query;
- and
- means for organizing and rendering a hierarchical view of the search results, in response to a user selection of an interactive control element of the graphical user interface.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.