Abstract: Techniques are presented to display values for a set of icons by controlling their assignment to a set of rows and their placement within these rows. A plurality of icons to be displayed is determined. An abacus attribute taking a finite set of values is associated with the set of icons. Icon groups are formed for each abacus attribute value and optionally ordered based on each of one or more sorting attributes. Inter-group indicators such as display characteristic changes, spacing and the like are determined. The inter-group indicators separate each group of icons within a row. An ordering of the icons is determined based on the abacus attribute value and the one or more optional sorting attribute values. The icons are laid out in the display space ordered by the values of the primary abacus attribute and the secondary optional sorting attributes.

Abstract: Techniques are presented to semantically zoom information to fit within a bounded display space. A bounded display space optionally constrained by size or shape is determined. Semantically coherent portions of information to be displayed within the bounded space are determined. Transformation rules are applied to the portion of the information to be displayed to produce a plurality of different length representations. A store of semantic zoom level information associates combinations of the different length portion representations. A desired number of information elements to be displayed within the bounded display space is determined. Iterations over the store of semantic zoom information determine combinations of different length representations that fit within the bounded display space.

Abstract: Techniques are presented for determining a first set of display elements, each display element associated with a first display characteristic. An interesting element in the first set of display elements is determined. A second set of elements related to the interesting element is determined. A third set of elements based on the first and second set of elements is determined using intersection, union, subtraction addition and other logical operations. A third set of elements not yet added to the element collection is determined. The elements in the third set are associated with a second or ghosted display characteristic. The elements in the third set are inserted within the sorted context of the visualization based on spatial distortion rules which help to preserve spatial memory cues in the visualization of the element collection. The elements may be documents in an information repository, linked contact information, linked information records in a database or other types of information.

Abstract: One aspect of the invention receives a plurality of possible list elements and determines a first document space size responsive to a first query that incorporates the possible list elements and defines a first document space. It also determines sizes of second document spaces using a second query set containing separate queries each of which incorporates a different proper subset of the candidate phrases and wherein each of the different proper subset has the same cardinality and defines one of the second document spaces. This aspect also ranks the first document space and the second document spaces. Once the document spaces are ranked, documents are identified so that list elements can be extracted from at least one of the identified documents and presented (for example, displayed, returned in a database, returned in response to a function or subroutine call, etc.).

Abstract: One aspect of the invention extracts a human readable list from a document. It does this by accessing a file that contains data that represents a portion of the document. The data is formatted in accordance with a document formatting description. The data is parsed into tokens that include container tokens and textual tokens. From the container tokens, this aspect determines a context for some of the textual tokens. Once the context is determined, this aspect determines a separator pattern between one of the textual tokens and an adjacent textual token where both the textual token and the adjacent textual token have the same context. Once the separator pattern is determined, the textual tokens can be extracted responsive to the separator pattern. Finally, the textual tokens are presented as the human readable list (for example, displayed, returned in a database, returned in response to a function or subroutine call, etc.).

Abstract: One aspect of the invention generates a plurality of candidate phrases in response to a first open-site network search for a category term. This aspect also determines an external score in response to a second open-site network search for at least one of the plurality of candidate phrases. Furthermore, this aspect determines an internal score for the at least one of the plurality of candidate phrases in response to at least one targeted-site network search for the category term. A final score for the at least one of the plurality of candidate phrases is determined responsive to the internal score and the external score. At least one of the plurality of candidate phrases is presented (for example, displayed, returned in a database, returned in response to a function or subroutine call, etc.).

Abstract: A system and methods for copying, deleting, replacing, and moving content in group-editable web pages is disclosed. The system includes a server and devices, such as computers, which can communicate via a network. Users at the computers can access group-editable web pages from the server and request that content operations be performed involving content in a first page and optionally one or more second pages. The server obtains content operation details needed to perform the content operation by finding content operation implementation information in the first page itself and/or in another page.