Online interactive voting system for live interactive evaluation and comparison of proposals

#This application is the U.S. national phase of international application PCT/SE02/00125 filed 24 Jan. 2002, which designated the U.S., the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.

#The present invention relates to online voting systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a database system facilitating live interactive evaluation and categorization of proposals over a network such as the Internet.

#The Internet provides a wonderful forum for mass distribution of information. Associated with the concept of mass distribution of information is the problem of information overload and difficulties identifying relevant pieces of information.

#While the novel features of the invention are set forth with particularly in the appended claims, a complete understanding of the invention, both as to organization and content, and of the above and other features thereof may be gained from and the invention will be better appreciated from a consideration of the following detailed description of non-limiting embodiments presented hereinbelow with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:

#FIG. 1 is a diagrammatic illustration of a simple computer network system having a client and a Web site.

#FIG. 2 is a flow diagram showing steps available to a user (non-administrator) of the system.

#A computer network system, particularly one on the scale of the Internet, has many host network servers connected to serve data to many clients over a network. FIG. 1 shows a simple computer network system 20 representative of the familiar, large-scale Internet environment. The system 20 has a client computer 22 resident at a user's premises. Although illustrated as a desktop PC, the client computer 22 is representative of many different types of computing devices, including portable computers, hand held computers, pagers, Web-phones, set-top boxes for TVs, and so forth.

#The client computer 22 connects to the Internet 24 via a modem, network card, or other type of interface. The client computer 22 runs a Web browser application, not shown, to access content provided on the World Wide Web. The Web content is maintained at a variety of Web sites, as represented by the Web site 26.

#The Web site 26 has one or more server computers, collectively referred to as server 28. The server computers may be implemented in various ways, including Unix-based server computers or PC-based computers. The server 28 includes electronic processing means such one more processors running a Web server software program 30 that accepts requests from the client-based Web browser, accesses data stored in a memory in or at the server, the data including a HashTable 32 with corresponding background processes 34 and a system database Pages 42 with corresponding application databases 44.