Graphical web browsing interface for spatial data navigation and method of navigating data blocks

A computer implemented method of navigating data blocks, comprising:

• opening a first data block of a plurality of data blocks of interest, said plurality of data blocks being spatially indexed in N dimensions;
• viewing a closeness relationship between said first data block opened and a second plurality of data blocks based on their content;
• accessing a second data block of said second plurality of data blocks which is viewed to be closest to said first data block;
• inputting, by a user, an input indicating a search to be performed, the input including a collection of data blocks which are to be indexed, said data blocks selectively containing data, metadata, and links to other data blocks;
• wherein the user further inputs a search depth defining how many links are to be followed during a search process and a collection of text strings 1 to N is input, said text strings being used as search criteria in a spatial indexing process,
• creating, for each data block given as an input, an index record for storing search results which relate each said data block to each of the strings in the collection;
• and
• creating a global index record array which contains index records for each of the data blocks given as an input,
• wherein said indexing of the data blocks includes:
• determining whether an index record i is less than a number M of blocks in the database and if so setting a number j to 0;
• determining whether j is less than the number N of keywords in a search corpus, and if so, calculating a search result Rj as a number of occurrences of word Wj in the data block B(i);
• storing the search result Rj in the index of block B(i);
• and
• incrementing j by “1” and determining whether j is less than N.

A computer implemented method of navigating data blocks, comprising:

• opening a first data block of a plurality of data blocks of interest, said plurality of data blocks being spatially indexed in N dimensions;
• viewing a closeness relationship between said first data block opened and a second plurality of data blocks based on their content;
• accessing a second data block of said second plurality of data blocks which is viewed to be closest to said first data block;
• and
• calculating and displaying a proximity list for a data block,
• said calculating comprising:
• reading an input data block B(c);
• reading search results R1 to Rn stored in the index in block B;
• setting i to “1”, and determining whether i is less than a number M of blocks in the database and if so, setting j to 1 and a distance to 0;
• determining whether j is less than a number N of key words in a search corpus, and if so incrementing the distance to a sum of a previous distance and an absolute value of a difference between a result Rj of block Bc and the result Rj of block Bj, and incrementing j.