Patent Application
20070277106
The foregoing and other purposes, aspects and advantages will be better understood from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention with reference to the drawings, in which:
Referring now to the drawings, and more particularly to
The exemplary mechanism described herein for the present invention can be perhaps considered as an incorporation, into software slide generation/presentation programs, of features resembling those available in various data-intensive software programs.
For example, a spreadsheet software application might typically include features of use for tagging and macro generation. A database software application program might typically include features of use for query languages and semantic-language recognition. Typically, in any of these application programs, the most commonly needed of these features are implemented in a pull-down menu format.
The present invention teaches the incorporation of similar features to the environment of slide-reading software, such as, for example, Microsoft PowerPoint™, Adobe AcroRead™, OpenOffice™. Similar to the implementation of these features in other environments, the present invention also teaches that the most commonly needed of these features can be implemented in a pull-down menu format.
Thus, it can be seen from
In step 102, the method of the present invention includes a tag with various predetermined information (e.g., such as words in the slide title or slide body, format information such as slide categories or the presentation outline categories into which the slide is originally fitted) and/or enables the user to create new tags formats or data for the functions related to slide management. It should be noted that the “tag” is not necessarily a single tag, since any number of tags could be associated with a slide for purpose of slide management, possibly including, as non-limiting examples, different tags for different slide management functions, different types of information, different data fields, and so on.
As mentioned earlier, a tag might be predefined, perhaps because of an expected common usage, or it might be initiated and defined by user manual input, similar to the concept of a user-defined macro in a word processor, or could be extracted automatically from data in the information or format fields of the data for each slide or from the format and/or overall organization of the slide presentation.
If, for example, the slides had been arranged in a certain order by the presenter and a question arose during the presentation, the remainder of the presentation could be rearranged automatically by selecting and activating one or more tag criteria that would re-organize the slides in a new sequence more appropriate to the direction implied from the question. Moreover, it is noted that user-defined tags can be expressed in semantic (natural) language.
In method step 103, the slide managing mechanism of the present invention could also include various pre-set functions to exercise the tags and/or includes the capability of allowing the user to define new functions, again similar to the concept of user-defined macros currently available in such applications as conventional word processors. Non-limiting examples of pre-defined slide management functions would include sorting, filtering, and other related functions, including possibly functions related to automatically organizing and/or reorganizing the slides into a presentation sequence according to criteria defined by tag information.
These capabilities such as sorting would be useful, for example, in scenarios in which slides are originally arranged by the author in accordance with a hierarchy of ordering or classification and the presenter wishes to rearrange the ordering or hierarchy because of events during the presentation. The capabilities such as filtering would be useful, for example, when only a subset of the entire set of slides is relevant for a particular presentation.
A number of functions could be provided by a slide management program as taught by the present invention. As non-limiting examples, functions might include the sorting of the slides or the filtering of the slides in accordance with one or more criteria, and/or querying of the slides, including a concept similar to retrieval of matches of a user query search. As previously indicated, the functions might involve manipulation of data included in the information content of the slides themselves, the format data of each slide, or even some indication of the organization or classification of the slides in the organization of the original presentation.
The slide management feature is not intended as confined to a single criterion, but could have a hierarchy of criteria defined, similar to a definition of a macro or query that is well known in other arts, such that the user could define a plurality of criteria that defines a complex management scheme for the slides.
Finally, in step 104, the slide managing software method also includes a mechanism to operate the feature, including, for example, implementation of such mechanisms as drop-down menus for implementing one or more functions discussed above.
Thus, as exemplarily shown in
It is also noted that, although
The CPUs 511 are interconnected via a system bus 512 to a random access memory (RAM) 514, read-only memory (ROM) 516, input/output (I/O) adapter 518 (for connecting peripheral devices such as disk units 521 and tape drives 540 to the bus 512), user interface adapter 522 (for connecting a keyboard 524, mouse 526, speaker 528, microphone 532, and/or other user interface device to the bus 512), a communication adapter 534 for connecting an information handling system to a data processing network, the Internet, an Intranet, a personal area network (PAN), etc., and a display adapter 536 for connecting the bus 512 to a display device 538 and/or printer 539 (e.g., a digital printer or the like).
In addition to the hardware/software environment described above, a different aspect of the invention includes a computer-implemented method for performing the above method. As an example, this method may be implemented in the particular environment discussed above.
Such a method may be implemented, for example, by operating a computer, as embodied by a digital data processing apparatus, to execute a sequence of machine-readable instructions. These instructions may reside in various types of signal-bearing media.
Thus, this aspect of the present invention is directed to a programmed product, comprising signal-bearing media tangibly embodying a program of machine-readable instructions executable by a digital data processor incorporating the CPU 511 and hardware above, to perform the method of the invention.
This signal-bearing media may include, for example, a RAM contained within the CPU 511, as represented by the fast-access storage for example. Alternatively, the instructions may be contained in another signal-bearing media, such as a magnetic data storage diskette 600 (
Whether contained in the diskette 600, the computer/CPU 511, or elsewhere, the instructions may be stored on a variety of machine-readable data storage media, such as DASD storage (e.g., a conventional “hard drive” or a RAID array), magnetic tape, electronic read-only memory (e.g., ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM), an optical storage device (e.g. CD-ROM, WORM, DVD, digital optical tape, etc.), paper “punch” cards, or other suitable signal-bearing media including transmission media such as digital and analog and communication links and wireless. In an illustrative embodiment of the invention, the machine-readable instructions may comprise software object code.
While the invention has been described in terms of a single preferred embodiment, those skilled in the art will recognize that the invention can be practiced with modification within the spirit and scope of the appended claims.
Further, it is noted that, Applicants' intent is to encompass equivalents of all claim elements, even if amended later during prosecution.
