Patent Application
20050089017
The present invention relates to link-data registration processing which enables easy data access to a URL, a file, or a directory.
Along with the development of the Internet technology and a large-capacity storage, the amount of information handled by individuals is increasing. As a result, problems, e.g., not being able to find desired information or a time-consuming process to reach desired information, arise. Therefore, there are increasing demands for data access means that enables efficient data access.
For instance, according to a browser for browsing a content of the Internet on a computer, registering a URL (path) and a corresponding tag name (link data) in a module called “bookmark” or “my favorite” enables a user to easily access the content designated by the URL by clicking the tag name without inputting the URL.
Furthermore, to access a desired file or directory stored in a deep hierarchical structure of a computer memory or to access a drive allocated to a peripheral device such as a computer or printer connected to a network, a shortcut (link data) is generated in a directory that is convenient for a user by a method such as “link” or “shortcut”, and as a result, the user is able to access the desired file or directory by simply double-clicking the shortcut without tracking the hierarchical structure.
Meanwhile, various proposals have been made on an efficient generation method of data access means. For instance, for a method of generating web access means using speech recognition, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (KOKAI) No. 2002-41081 discloses a method that analyzes a web-page content tag and generates web access means by automatically combining speech recognition grammar in various manners.
Furthermore, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (KOKAI) No. 9-162966 discloses a method for a speech dial device, which prompts a user to input a name of a caller so as to enable speech input of the name of a high-frequency dial transmission. According to this method, the system automatically prompts a user to register link data for the frequently accessed path, enabling efficient generation of data access means.
However, the aforementioned Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (KOKAI) No. 2002-41081 has the following problems. Since each system has as its inside information various combinations of words that are assumed to be vocalized by users, a user has no way of knowing what to vocalize. Furthermore, in order to accept various speeches, it is necessary to prepare plural words and word strings for one path. If the number of registered paths increases, the number of vocabularies subjected to recognition becomes enormous, and as a result, practical speech recognition performance may not be achieved.
Moreover, the aforementioned Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (KOKAI) No. 9-162966 has the following problem. In a case where a user key-inputs a name corresponding to a telephone number as character data, it is difficult to perform the input from a small device, e.g., a telephone set, and it lacks convenience.
Besides, there are various problems in generating data access means. For instance, normally a tag name or a shortcut name for a URL is uniquely determined by a system. To change the name, a user must perform input from a keyboard. Furthermore, under one hierarchy, a user cannot set plural tags or shortcuts having the same name even if they have different paths. Still further, a user must always input character data, and is unable to set link data by image data only such as an icon. Moreover, a user cannot set link data by sound. As described above, the conventional data access means generation has various problems in terms of convenience and functionality.
The present invention has been proposed in view of the above-described problems, and the first object of the invention is to improve user friendliness in practical generation of data access means. Moreover, the second object is to achieve highly functional generation of data access means.
In order to achieve the above objects, the data processing method according to the present invention has the following configuration. More specifically, a data processing method of registering a path for data access and link data for the path, comprising:
According to the present invention, it is possible to improve user friendliness in practical generation of data access means. Furthermore, it is possible to achieve highly functional generation of data access means.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the following description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which like reference characters designate the same or similar parts throughout the figures thereof.
The accompanying drawings, which are incorporated in and constitute a part of the specification, illustrate embodiments of the invention and, together with the description, serve to explain the principles of the invention.
Preferred embodiments of the present invention will now be described in detail in accordance with the accompanying drawings.
According to the present invention, it is possible to improve user friendliness in practical generation of data access means. Furthermore, it is possible to generate highly functional data access means.
Hereinafter, preferred embodiments of the present invention are described with reference to the accompanying drawings. Note in the description, meanings of respective terms are defined as follows. More specifically, an “object” means a function that constitutes one conceptual group. In this invention, an “object” is a concept that includes a content designated by a URL, a file generated by an application software, and a directory indicative of a file storage destination. Furthermore, a “path” generally means a method of indicating a position of a file or folder (directory) in the UNIX (registered trademark), MS-DOS, Windows (registered trademark) and the like. In this invention, in a case where an access target is an Internet content, assume that the URL is also included in the “path”. Furthermore, the “link data” indicates a shortcut icon or the like in a case where the access target is a file or a directory, and indicates a tag name or the like in a case where the access target is a content. The “link data” has a function for automatically accessing the link destination when a user selects the link data on a screen.
<Hardware Construction>
The ROM 102 stores various parameters and a control program executed by the CPU 101. The RAM 103 provides a working area when the CPU 101 executes various controlling, and stores a control program executed by the CPU 101. Numeral 104 denotes an external storage device, e.g., a hard disk, floppy (registered trademark) disk, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, memory card and the like. In a case where a hard disk serves as the external storage device 104, the hard disk stores various programs installed from CD-ROM, floppy (registered trademark) disk or the like.
Numeral 105 denotes a data input unit, e.g., a touch panel, buttons, a pen, a pad for inputting a handwritten character, a mouse, a keyboard, a barcode and so on. Numeral 106 denotes a data display unit, e.g., a CRT, a liquid crystal display, a touch panel or the like, for displaying or outputting data such as characters and images. Numeral 107 denotes a speech input unit, e.g., a microphone or the like, for performing data access by speech recognition or performing device operation by speech. Numeral 108 denotes a speech output unit, e.g., a speaker or the like, for performing data notification to a user. Numeral 109 denotes a bus connecting the above-described respective units.
<Processing for Registration>
In a path input unit 201, the URL designated by a user is recognized. The URL is designated by one of or any arbitrary combination of a keyboard, a mouse, a button, a pen, handwritten characters, speech, a barcode, and a touch panel from the data input unit 105 and speech input unit 107.
Next, in a link data candidate generation unit 202, structural analysis and text analysis are performed on the HTML document source file, and a link data candidate is generated. For an example of structural analysis, tag data of the HTML is removed to extract the text such as “Latest National News”, “Hokkaido”, “Snow Festival in Sapporo” and “Fish in Otaru“.
Next, text analysis is performed on these text data. First, morphological analysis is applied to divide the text into words. By the analysis, the texts are divided into, for instance, (national)/
/
(latest)/
(news)”,
(Hokkaido)”,
(Sapporo)/
(in)/
(snow festival)” and
(Otaru)/
(in)/
(fish)” (“/” is a symbol indicative of word segmentation).
Next, in addition to each text, a word string or a partial word string is generated. For instance, with respect to the text (national)/
/
(latest)/
(news)”, word strings or partial word strings such as
(national)”, “
“
(latest)”,
(news)”,
,
,
(latest news)”,
(national news)” and so on can be generated as the link data candidates in addition to
(Latest National News)”. Herein, the candidates are narrowed down by candidate screening, such as likelihood of the word string, character number limitation, word frequency and so forth. To obtain likelihood of the word string, for instance, a method based on the language likelihood using the well-known Word bi-gram can be used. Similarly with regard to the text such as “snow festival in Sapporo” and “fish in Otaru,” candidates of word strings or partial word strings are generated.
Herein, it is preferable to limit the number of link data candidates for a path to a predetermined number or less. For this reason, it is preferable to control that a predetermined number of word strings be selected in order of highest likelihood. The selection criterion can be changed in accordance with the HTML tag attribute. For instance, it is highly likely that the portion between the title tags (between “<title>” and “</title>”) appropriately expresses the content of the HTML document (contents). Therefore, assuming that the number of link data candidates obtained by performing structural analysis and text analysis on the XTML document is, e.g., six, it may be controlled to generate four candidates from the title-tag texts and two candidates from other texts.
Further, it is possible to generate link data candidates employing the user's use state, indicative of the use state of the user's device accessing the path. The user's use state includes a date of access, time, time of the day such as morning, afternoon and night, time data such as a day of the week, position data at the time of access, user's ID, and so forth. Assuming that the time at which a user accesses the XTML document is “the morning on December 25” and the position data at the time of access is the area of “Tokyo station”, these data can be used as link data candidates.
Next, in a link data candidate exhibiting unit 203, the link data candidates for the HTML source file obtained in the above-described manner are exhibited to the user. An example is shown in
Next, a link data selection unit 204 recognizes one link data selected by the user from the link data candidates exhibited by the data candidate exhibiting unit 203. The selection is made by one of or any arbitrary combination of a keyboard, a mouse, a button, a pen, speech, and a touch panel from the data input unit 105 and speech input unit 107.
At last, a link data registration unit 205 registers the link data selected by the user from the link data selection unit 204 and the path of the link data.
<Access Processing>
A block diagram of a data processing apparatus which performs data access employing the link data and its path registered in the above-described processing is shown in
An example of link data exhibited to the user by the registered link data exhibiting unit 501 is shown in
An example of link data and its path data stored in the link/path data storage 503 in the example of
Similarly, “image” and “sound” means that the link data is generated from an image portion or a sound portion of a XHML document (details will be described later). Further, “date”, “time” and “place” means that the link data is generated from information regarding date, time and place as the use state of the user's device. The third column shows contents of the link. In a case where the link type is a text, the text is shown. In a case where the link type is an image or sound, the file name is shown. In a case where the link type is the date, time or place, the portion storing the data is shown. The fourth column shows path data corresponding to the link. In this example, URL path data is shown. For instance, when the user selects “National News” in
As is apparent from the above description, according to the first embodiment, plural types of candidates are exhibited to a user for link data corresponding to the path inputted by the user, and the user can select one from the candidates to register the path and corresponding link data. Therefore, a user, who is unable to perform keyboard input or a user who uses a device not having a keyboard or a device in which input operation is difficult, can register link data by a convenient method in accordance with the user's preference. As a result, it is possible to improve user friendliness while achieving practicality.
In the first embodiment, the HTML document only includes text data. However, the HTML document may include a link to image data. In this case, the image in the link destination is subjected to image analysis, and the obtained image data is used as a link data candidate. Various methods may be considered for the image analysis. For instance, in a case where the image data in the link destination is a still image, it is subjected to image-format conversion or size conversion so as to be exhibited by the link data candidate exhibiting unit 203 or registered link data exhibiting unit 501.
In a case where the image data in the link destination is a moving image, image data obtained by, e.g., converting the first frame of the moving image into a still image, converting the most characteristic scene of the moving image into a still image, or extracting the entire or a part of the moving image as moving-image data, can be used as a link data candidate.
In
As is apparent from the above description, in a case where an HTML document includes a link to image data, the image data is exhibited to a user as a link data candidate, and when the user selects the image data as link data, the location where the image data exists is registered as link data in association with the path data of the HTML document. In this manner, according to the second embodiment, link data can be set by image data, and highly functional data access means can be generated.
In the first embodiment, the HTML document only includes text data. However, the HTML document may include a link to sound data. In this case, the sound in the link destination is subjected to sound analysis, and the obtained sound data is used as a link data candidate. Various methods may be considered for the sound analysis. For instance, the sound data is converted to a sound format that can be reproduced by the link data candidate exhibiting unit 203 or registered link data exhibiting unit 501 (e.g., conversion from MP3 to PCM or conversion of a sampling rate).
Besides, sound data obtained by, e.g., extracting a predetermined interval or a predetermined number of bytes of sound data from the beginning, or extracting the most characteristic portion of the sound data, can be used as a link data candidate. Furthermore, by identifying the type of sound using a technique such as an auditory scene analysis, or by performing speech recognition on the speech portion of the sound data, the sound data can be converted to text data, and the text data can be used as a character string for generating a link data candidate using the method described in the first embodiment or a similar method.
In
As is apparent from the above description, in a case where an HTML document includes a link to sound data, the sound data is exhibited to a user as a link data candidate, and when the user selects the sound data as link data, the location where the sound data exists is registered as link data in association with the path data of the HTML document. In this manner, according to the third embodiment, link data can be set by sound data, and highly functional data access means can be generated.
Although the above-described first to third embodiments have described a case where hyper link data of a URL is an HTML document, hyper link data is not limited to this. The present invention can similarly be applied to data such as XHTML, CHTML, XML and so forth.
Although the above-described first to fourth embodiments have described a case where the data access path is a URL, the path is not limited to a URL, but may be a file stored in a computer or an information technology device. In a case of a file also, it is possible to perform data registration in the similar manner to that of a URL.
Although the above-described first to fifth embodiments have described a case where the data access path is a URL or a file, the path is not limited to this, but may be a directory (folder) stored in a computer or an information technology device. In this case, a link data candidate is generated from one or any arbitrary combination of a directory name, a file name stored in a directory, a file content, and a directory name. An example of a directory and a file included in the directory is shown in
In the example shown in
In the above-described embodiments, the link data candidate obtained as a text is a character string displayed as a text to a user. However, by generating how-to-read data and accent data for speech synthesis, it is possible to perform speech output at the time of exhibiting the link data candidates by the link data candidate exhibiting unit 203, at the time of recognizing a selection designation by the link data selection unit 204, at the time of exhibition by the registered link data exhibiting unit 501, and at the time of recognizing a selection designation by the registered link data selection unit 502.
Numerals 301 to 304 perform the similar operation as 201 to 204 in
(national weather)+ze'nkokuno/te'nki” that is a pair of text data and speech synthesis data, including how-to-read data and accent data. Note that “+” indicates a combine symbol, “/” indicates segmentation of a basic block, and “′” indicates an accent symbol. Note that the how-to-read data and accent data automatically outputted by the text-speech synthesizing unit 305 may be changed in accordance with user's preference. If the change made is unnecessary or impossible, it is not always necessary to output how-to-read data.
In the above-described embodiments, the link data candidate obtained as a text is a character string displayed as a text to a user. However, by generating a character string and how-to-read data for speech recognition, it is possible to input path using speech recognition at the time of selection designation recognition by the link data selection unit 204 or at the time of selection designation recognition by the registered link data selection unit 502.
(national weather)+zeXkokunoteXki” that is a pair of text data and how-to-read data necessary for speech recognition. Note that “+” indicates a combine symbol.
The link types employed in the above-described embodiments include text, image, sound, time, position, synthesis, and recognition. By arbitrarily combining these data, it is possible to generate link data candidates.
In the above-described embodiments, link data selected by a user is registered. In this stage, there may be a case that the same or similar link information as the selected link data already exists. In such case, this link data can be excluded from the candidates at the time of link data candidate generation, or additional data for informing the user can be generated.
In the above-described embodiments, link data candidates are generated in response to path input and then user selection is made. However, it is possible to count the number of times of access to a path and the processing subsequent to the link data candidate generation can be performed when the number of times of access to a path exceeds a predetermined number of times.
When a path is inputted by a user in the path input unit 701, a path/access number of times data 703 is referred to and the counter counting the number of times of access for the path inputted by the path input unit 701 is incremented by one. When an access number of times determination unit 704 determines that the number of times of access exceeds a predetermined number of times ε, processing from the link data candidate generation unit 705 to the link data registration unit 708 is performed. If an access number of times is less than the predetermined number of times ε, link data registration processing is not performed, and the control proceeds to processing by a data access unit 709. For the predetermined number of times ε, an individual value may be set by a user for each path or path category, or the counter increment may be changed in accordance with an interval (difference in period of time) of an access for one same path, or the access number of times data stored in the path/access number of times data 703 may be reset or reduced in accordance with the interval (difference in period of time).
Further, the object of the present invention can also be achieved by providing a storage medium, storing program codes of software realizing the above-described functions of the embodiments, to a computer system or apparatus, reading the program codes, by a computer (CPU or MPU) of the computer system or apparatus, from the storage medium, then executing the program.
In this case, the program codes read from the storage medium realize the functions according to the embodiments, and the storage medium storing the program codes constitutes the invention. The storage medium, such as a floppy (registered trademark) disk, hard disk, an optical disk, a magneto-optical disk, CD-ROM, CD-R, a magnetic tape, a non-volatile type memory card, and ROM can be used for providing the program codes.
Furthermore, besides aforesaid functions according to the above embodiments are realized by executing the program codes which are read by a computer, the present invention includes a case where an OS (operating system) or the like working on the computer performs a part or the entire processes in accordance with designations of the program codes and realizes functions according to the above embodiments.
Furthermore, the present invention also includes a case where, after the program codes read from the storage medium are written in a function expansion card which is inserted into the computer or in a memory provided in a function expansion unit which is connected to the computer, a CPU or the like contained in the function expansion card or unit performs a part or the entire processes in accordance with designations of the program codes and realizes functions of the above embodiments.
The present invention is not limited to the above embodiment and various changes and modifications can be made within the spirit and scope of the present invention. Therefore, to apprise the public of the scope of the present invention, the following claims are made.
This application claims priority from Japanese. Patent Application No. 2003-366313 filed on Oct. 27, 2003, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
| Number | Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2003-366313 | Oct 2003 | JP | national |
