Patent Application
20130151231
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
The current invention relates generally to managing a knowledge base in a database network system.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
A community, also commonly referred to as a forum, web forum, and community website, is a group of users that share a common interest and tend to communicate with one another about that common interest. A community website is a website in which users share ideas that are related to the community. Forum content may be used to refer to a question or questions and answers discussed in a forum. Traditional forums have focused on providing a meeting place for a virtual community of Internet users who share common interest.
The widespread use of the Internet, which crosses national and cultural boundaries, as well as the globalization of business opportunities has presented the need to provide information in various languages, as well as targeting information to specific groups. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide techniques for managing a multi-lingual knowledge base in a database network system.
In the following drawings like reference numbers are used to refer to like elements. Although the following figures depict various examples, the one or more implementations are not limited to the examples depicted in the figures.
Systems and methods are provided for managing a multi-lingual knowledge base in a database network system.
Although various embodiments of the invention may have been motivated by various deficiencies with the prior art, which may be discussed or alluded to in one or more places in the specification, the embodiments of the invention do not necessarily address any of these deficiencies. In other words, different embodiments of the invention may address different deficiencies that may be discussed in the specification. Some embodiments may only partially address some deficiencies or just one deficiency that may be discussed in the specification, and some embodiments may not address any of these deficiencies.
As used herein, the term multi-tenant database system refers to a database system that has multiple tenants that each has a degree of access to at least a portion of the database system that may or may not be the same as the degree of access as other tenants. Each tenant may be an individual or an organization that may have representatives, members, employees, customers and/or other entities associated with the tenant, which in turn, as a result of the tenancy of the tenant in the multitenant database, may also have different degrees of access to the database. The degree of access granted to those associated with the tenant and/or which entities (e.g., representatives, members, employees, customers and/or other entities) are associated with the tenant may be determined by the tenant. The database system may include multiple databases, and each database may be partitioned and/or otherwise shared amongst multiple tenants. The multitenant database may be provided on demand, that is as a service to the tenants, so that the tenants have use of the multitenant database for their own purposes that determined by the tenants, but the tenants do not need to worry about the maintaining the database, the operations of the database, or how the database works.
A community, also commonly referred to as a forum, web forum, and community website, is a group of users that share a common interest and tend to communicate with one another about that common interest. A community website is a website in which users share ideas that are related to the community. The focus of the communities may be enterprise communities, which are communities structured around a business' ecosystem: partners, customers, vendors, employees, etc.
Forum content may be used to refer to a question or questions and answers discussed in a forum. The forum contents may reside in a database. The forum may include various features and/or tools that are available to users and/or administrators. Some content may be placed initially on the forum at the launch of the website, which gives an initial significant value to the website that may be linearly proportional to the number of users that are able to view the content and that are expected to be interested in the content. Enabling user interaction with one another, via the posting of new ideas, the commenting on ideas, and/or participating in discussions causes the value of the website to increase in the community.
Traditional forums have focused on providing a meeting place for a virtual community of Internet users who share common interest. However, forums may also be used for lowering costs in a business context by providing a cheaper avenue for customer service. Instead of calling into a call center where a human agent takes calls and answers questions, forums may provide a more scalable method where customers may help each other answer their own questions.
Generally, forums serve a similar function to customer support. However, there are questions that may come into a forum that may need to be escalated to a customer support agent for a variety of reasons. A few examples of such cases may be the importance of the issue, the severity of the customer's problem alluded to in the question, a question unanswered by the community, and/or the value of the customer, among other reasons. Questions and issues in a forum that are deemed to be of widespread interest to a community, or are frequently encountered may be turned into an article. A collection of articles may be grouped together to form a knowledge base.
Embodiments provide multilingual capabilities to knowledge base (KB) applications, including the ability to create and publish translations of pre-existing knowledge articles by internal users and/or external translation vendors.
Embodiments enable tenants to manage multi-lingual knowledge bases, so that end users may access articles based on a language the end user chooses, while also providing publishers (e.g., tenants) with tools to manage articles in different languages and to translate the articles. In an embodiment, the tenant either using an external vendor or an in house translators, and providing administrators (knowledge managers) with the ability to setup or choose which languages are available in a KB, as well as default language assignments for translations.
In at least one embodiment, end users may be categorized into three groups—employees, portal users, and web users, with each group presented with different capabilities in the multi-lingual knowledge base.
Employees, who are members of an organization that is a tenant in a multi-tenant database, may interactively select the language that is being used to search the knowledge base using a language selector in an article tab of a user interface (UI), which will be explained and illustrated in greater detail below. Under an article tab, employees may have an extra drop-down menu in a filter section that lists the available languages in which knowledge articles may be configured in. In at least one embodiment, by default the language selected for an article from the knowledge base is the UI language of a user if the UI language is supported by the knowledge base. If the UI language is not supported, then a different default Knowledge language may be selected. In at least one embodiment, the language drop/down control is not sticky, meaning that each time the user goes to a new article under the article tab, the language value is reset to the default one rather than being kept set to the last language chosen. When a user changes the language value, the UI language does not change, only the article language changes.
For example, a multi-tenant application is configured to display articles in three languages: French, English (as default), and Spanish, while a user's UI language is French. In the present example, when the user opens the article tab, the language selected is French since the UI is in French, and the articles are also displayed in French. If the user changes the language value to English under the article tab, the UI stays in French, but articles are then displayed in English. Furthermore, in the article display page, the user may be able to switch to other language versions of the article (if other language versions are available) through a drop-down list selector. Again, switching languages may only change the language of the articles, the language of the UI stays in the UI language of the user.
Portal users may use the multi-lingual knowledge base in the language matching their UI language (defaulting to the KB default language if the language of the UI is not supported by knowledge base). The same features that were described above for employees may also be available for portal users (customer portal/partner portal)
Available language access for Web users, also referred to as public knowledge base (PKB) users or anonymous users, who are not affiliated with the tenant organization (but for example may visit the tenant's website and/or participate in the tenant's forum discussion), may depend on the implementation of embodiments, where the language choices may range from a different PKB per language to a (cookie based) persistent language selection using a language selector. In at least one embodiment, users may be able to pick languages for article display with a drop down menu on the user's UI.
Knowledgebase publishers may be categorized into one of several categories, such as knowledge managers, simple contributors, translation managers, and translators. It is noted that additional categories may be implemented as required and/or in other embodiments. Contributors may be able to work (contribute content) on mono-lingual articles (the master language version) with the possibility to define the language of the article. Knowledge managers may have the same responsibilities as a mono-lingual contributor of knowledge, but also may be responsible for requesting translations of selected articles. Some knowledge managers or in an embodiment each knowledge manager may only decide whether to request a translation to a specific language or set of languages, and in another embodiment or other knowledge manages may be able to select from any available language into which to request translations. Translation managers may be able to export articles to be translated by a vendor, and then later the translation manager may import the new translations into the KB. Translators are users able to translate articles into other language(s).
In at least one implementation of the multi-lingual knowledge base, knowledge managers (administrators) may be able to easily add/remove languages that are supported in the KB when multi-lingual feature is enabled. Knowledge managers may also be able to select a default language and default assignments for translations that are requested—these assignments may determine if translations are done outside of the application or whether to use an in house translator (e.g., human) for translating the article.
In embodiments, discrepancy alerts, may be provided to notify users of out of sync processes. For example, if a modification needs to be made on a master article while the master article is in the process of being translated (in the application or outside the application), the mechanisms ensure that the user who is modifying the source article knows that one or more translations are in progress on the master article. The mechanism also provides users who save a source (master) article with a means to indicate if the changes made to the source article have an impact on any translations that may be associated with the source article. Translations that are associated with a source article undergoing changes are given a discrepancy alert.
In embodiments, an import feature may import and/or export a zip file as input. The zip file may contain translated articles. The user may have the option to choose to automatically publish the translations. If the master version is already published, a translation may then be automatically published, or if the master version has not been published, the import files may be marked as ready for publication. The user may also have the option to choose to re-assign translations to a different queue (or optionally, a different user) in a “translations to be reviewed” queue. Import (similar to export), may be asynchronous in the system for managing a multi-lingual knowledge base, allowing the user to perform other activities while waiting for the import to occur. In an embodiment, when the user imports (or exports) a document, an import task may be created and queued in the message queue, and the message queue is used for processing tasks that are not required to be performed in real-time, allowing other tasks to be performed while the import is being performed.
Next, mechanisms and methods for utilizing objects (which may be created using a Unified Data Dictionary (UDD) for modeling the objects) for managing a multi-lingual knowledge base will be described with reference to example embodiments. In this specification metadata refers to the information about the data in the multi-tenant database system. Metadata describes the characteristics of the data objects such as the type, the name, and the size of the data. Metadata may also contain information about the data table as such as the length of fields, the number of columns and other information. Metadata may include the relationship of the data objects. Metadata may help in understanding and interpreting the contents of a database system.
Server side system 100 may be part of an on demand multi-tenant database system. In this specification, the names of objects, pointers, and variables are chosen to describe the function and/or purpose of the object, pointer or variable. The specification is not limited to the specific objects, variables or pointers mentioned, but any combination of objects, variables, or pointers that will accomplish the same or a similar purpose may be substituted for the specific object, pointer or variable mentioned.
In an embodiment in a multi-tenant database system, application server 102 sends data and other messages (e.g., output from application programming interface (API) routines called by the user system) to user systems, retrieves data and other information for users, receives messages (e.g., the results of interacting with data and/or functions calls to API functions from users. User system is described further in conjunction with
Database 112 may be a multi-tenant relational database having different portions dedicated to different tenants. Application server 102 may access database 112 to store information received from the user system or may receive a messages that triggers a query for information stored in database 112. Database 112 may include a database server and a database. Application server 102, as a result of a message form a user triggering a query, may also retrieve information from database 112 requested by the tenant. Users, such as developers, may access database 112, via applications server 102 in order to test and/or add/modify features to database 112.
Knowledge base 114 is a collection of articles that are written to address problems and issues that may have a high interest and/or that are expected to be of interest to the community of users that interact with the tenant. Master articles 116 are the master versions of articles. Master articles 116 are written in a particular language, which is the original language of the article. Translations 118 are translated versions of the master articles 116. Translations 118 may be made available to users, via knowledge base 114. UDD 120 is a library of templates of objects that are used for creating common type of objects. UDD 120 stores data object definitions of a variety of types of objects, and another application (e.g., a companion application) creates the actual objects from the data object definitions. A data object definition is included in the UDD 120 from which new KAs and new knowledge article versions (KAVs) may be constructed.
In an embodiment, user system 204 (which will be discussed further in conjunction with
As described in
In an embodiment, each of the steps of method 300 may be a distinct step. In other embodiments, method 300 may not have all of the above steps and/or may have other steps in addition to or instead of those listed above. The steps of method 300 may be performed in another order. Subsets of the steps listed above as part of method 300 may be used to form their own method. In an embodiment, there could be multiple instances of method 300.
Client Side Method of Interacting with the Multilinigual Knowledge Base
In step 402, the client side user device (discussed in conjunction with
In an embodiment, each of the steps of method 400 may be a distinct step. In other embodiments, method 400 may not have all of the above steps and/or may have other steps in addition to or instead of those listed above. The steps of method 400 may be performed in another order. Subsets of the steps listed above as part of method 400 may be used to form their own method. In an embodiment, there may be multiple instances of method 400.
KnowledgeArticle 501 may be a table or object for knowledge articles. KnowledgeArticle 501 may be a table that lists all of the knowledge articles, and may include. Id 502 of Knowledge article 501 is an identification of an article to distinguish a given article from other articles in a knowledge base. Each article, from a knowledge base, may have a single KA row (or attribute) in the KA table (or object), KnowledgeArticle 501 of the database, where the row represents the article as a whole. The KA row may provide the article with a stable Id 502 and with a stable life span. The life span is of the whole article including all of the article's versions. In an embodiment, KA 502 is a primary key of KnowledgeArticle 501. Although KnowledgeArticle 501 is indicated as only having the attribute Id 502, KnowledgeArticle 501 may have other attributes. In at least one embodiment, articles in a knowledge base are modeled through two main unified data dictionary (UDD) entities—one UDD entity corresponding to KnowledgeArticle (KA) 501 and one UDD entity corresponding to KnowledgeArticleVersion (KAV) having KAV table 504) as shown in
In embodiments, a KAV 504 is a child of KA 501 representing a specific article. A particular knowledge article in KA 501 may have a particular ID, which may be the same as the ID of a particular KAV table, KAV 504. KAV table (KAV 504) may also include columns for KnowledgeArticleId 508, PublishStatus 510, IsMasterLanguage 512, Language 514, and VersionNumber 516. In other embodiments KAV 504 may not have all of the elements or features listed and/or may have other elements or features instead of or in addition to those listed.
The KAV 504 is the version that contains the actual content of the article. An article version may be either “Draft,” “Online” or “Archived” as defined by the KAV.PublishStatus field. KnowledgeArticleId 508 identifies the knowledge article. In an embodiment, Id 502 has the same KnowledgeArticleId 508 value and may be a common key via which information in the tables may be joined to form various views. PublishStatus 510 indicates whether an article has been published and available for viewing and/or may indicate the state within a state machine of an article, which may includes states, such as editing, archived, and/or published, for example. As an aside (and as explained elsewhere), during the editing state the article is in the draft state (and there may be two versions of the article), and when the article is in published state, the article is published the article is online and available for viewing to the general public. IsMasterLanguage 512 indicates whether the article is in the master or originally authored language. The Language 514 is the language the article version is in. VersionNumber 516 identifies which version of the article is being accessed.
When an article is first created, in addition to the KA row in the KA table of the database, a KAV row is also created as the first draft version in the KAV table 504. The first draft version may only be accessible to publishers, who have Manage Knowledge profile permission, also referred to as a knowledge manager. Once the knowledge manager has finished writing the content of the article, the knowledge manager may publish the draft article, which may make the article become online as indicated by its KAV.PublishStatus field. An article version that is online may be seen by users that have read-only access to the knowledge base (such as agents, portal users, etc.). If at a later time an article needs to be changed or updated, a knowledge manager (or “publisher”) may create a new draft version from the existing online version, while still leaving the online version accessible. Once an article should no longer be available online it may be archived.
In embodiments, an article that has only been published in a single language may be referred to as mono-lingual article, the version of which would correspond to a single KAV row. However, in order to support multiple language versions of an article (a multi-lingual article), the multiple language version is now defined as a set of KAV rows, one row for the master language (or source language) which is the language in which the article was originally authored, and one row for each language in which the article has been translated. The KAV.IsMasterLanguage and KAV.Language fields provide indications of which article is written in the source language, and which articles are translated from the originally authored document through the KAV rows. In embodiments, the KAV rows for a specific version share a common version number accessible through the KAV.VersionNumber field.
The initial state of the article is draft 602. Articles in the state draft 602 are drafts of the articles that may need further work and/or review by others. In the monolingual state diagram, a draft 602 moves to an online state 604 by publishing the draft. Online state 604 is the state in which the article is published and available online. The article remains in online state 604 as long as the article is current. In addition, an online article 604 may transition to an archived state 606 when it is determined that the article is no longer current or needed. For example, if a new article is published with more complete information on the same subject, the earlier article may transition to archived state 606. Archived state 606 stores prior published articles that are no longer current or no longer needed in the knowledgebase. Alternatively, an article in the online state 604 may move to draft state 602 for further editing. For example, it may be discovered that there are many typos in the article in online state 602 or it may discovered that the information needs to be revised in light of new developments. Furthermore, an archived article 606 may also be edited, and move back to the draft state 602. For example, an article may be moved to the state archived article 606 due to lack of interest. Then at a later date, perhaps due to a change in technology, there is renewed interest in the subject of the article. In which case the article would be moved to draft state 602 so that the content could be reviewed to see if the article needs to be updated and revised prior to publishing.
The translation sub workflow of
More specifically, the transitions types PublishTranslation and Translate/ReviseTranslation may be included in the static enumerated type (enum) TransitionType. An enumerated type is a data type consisting of a set of named values called elements, members, or enumerators of the type. The enumerator names of the Transitions Type include identifiers that behave as constants in the language. A variable that has been declared as having an enumerated type may be assigned any of the enumerators as a value. Both of the transition types PublishTranslation and Translate/ReviseTranslation may be secured through a user interface (UI) by a user and/or group through the selection of “Setup/Articles/Action Security” and persisted in ProcessTransitionSecurity.
In the translation sub workflow embodiment shown in
The workflow engine of embodiments may support the PublishTranslation transition type in the following manner. The workflow engine checks if the PublishTranslation is accessible from the current state of the workflow, and that the current user has the right to do the transition. If in the current state the PublishTranslation transition is valid (and the transition can only be valid if the translation is in the state ready for publication 710), the transition is made, and ProcessInstance is updated to reflect the transition change to a new state, and the translations completed_date is set to the current date. In an embodiment, the PublishTranslation is valid (and the translation is published) only if the article that corresponds to the translation has published. In an embodiment, if the article that corresponds to the translation has not published, the PublishTranslaiton is not valid (and the translation is not published). Thus, in an embodiment, once in the ready to publish state 710, the article remains there until the master article publishes. Next, the knowledge base is queried to check the master article's KAV.PublishStatus for translation KAVs, which may involve finding an article with the same article id and version number, and for which IsMaster is true (as indicated by “KAV.PublishStatus” KAV is a table and PublishStatus is a column in the KAV table, which tracks the state of the KAV). After finding an article with the same article ID, version number for which IsMaster is true, the PublishStatus column is checked to see the status of the article, which could be Draft, Online or Archive, for example. If the master KAV for a translation is online, the translation KAVs are published (updating PublishStatus to Online, update version number, etc.), however if the master KAV is not online (e.g., KAV is a draft), then no update is needed for the KAV translations, and the translation is not published.
The workflow engine of embodiments may support the Translate/ReviseTranslation transition type in the following manner. The workflow engine checks that Translate/ReviseTranslation is accessible from the current state and that the current user has the right to do the transition. If in the current state the Translate/ReviseTranslation transition is valid, the transition is made, ProcessInstance is updated to reflect the transition change to a new state, and the translations completed_date is set to the current date. ProcessInstance may be a field in a table in which each record is a KA or KAV and the field of the table are used to keep track of the state of each KA or KAV. Furthermore, upon undergoing the Translate/Revise Translation transition any translations currently online are moved to back to the state of Draft 702, and the translations completed_date is set to null.
To support the management of translations in the KnowledgeArticle publishing process, the following changes to the mono-lingual workflow model and workflow engine may be required. Two additional transition types AddDraftTranslations and DeleteDraftTranslations are included in the static enum TransitionType. Both AddDraftTranslations and DeleteDraftTranslations may be accessed through the “Setup/Articles/Action Security” of the UI by users and/or groups and persisted in ProcessTransitionSecurity. In addition, new transitions of type AddDraftTranslations in the publishing process workflow model between the following states (nodes) are added:
Composition back to Composition
Published back to Published
WaitingPublication back to WaitingPublication
as well as new transitions of type DeleteDraftTranslations in the publishing process workflow model between the following states (or nodes):
Composition back to Composition
Published back to Published
WaitingPublication back to WaitingPublication
The DeleteDraftTranslations is added to the KA Publishing workflow instead of relying on CRUD Delete on KAV. Articles either in draft 702 or archive 706 may be deleted, and translation in progress 708 may be deleted. Applications may need the ability to use CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations to view and manipulate database rows. However, in embodiments for managing multi-lingual knowledge base CRUD operations may not be required to carrying out article management. As described above, embodiments of the KA publishing process manage the life cycle of the article as a whole controlling when versions may be created and deleted and by whom. For example creating a new draft for an existing article may only be allowed when the article is in the Published or Archived state, and the only users allowed to do so are those who have an entry in ProcessTransitionSecurity or are members of a group that are authorized to create a new draft. In a similar fashion, creating and deleting translations is only allowed when the article is in specific states and by users who have been authorized to do so through ProcessTransitionSecurity. Also, removing a draft translation is a very different proposition from deleting the master draft version, and an admin may likely want to secure the access differently. Such fine-grained access rules may not be defined using profile CRUD parameters. Furthermore, if instead of using transitions, a delete of translations with CRUD were implemented on KAV, the delete of translations with CRUD would require the delete to have an intimate hard coded knowledge of the KA publishing process knowing when to authorize the operation. In Addition, securing the operation for a set of users and groups for all the other transitions may not be possible with a solution based on the CRUD operation.
To support AddDraftTranslations transition type for the management of translations in the KnowledgeArticle publishing process, the following changes to the mono-lingual workflow model and workflow engine may be required as follows. Parameters that support bulk operations are added such as: List of {articleId, language, assigneId (owner/queue), due date (optional)}. A check may be performed whether the AddDraftTranslations is accessible from the current state, and that the current user has the right to execute the transition. A query may be performed to retrieve any existing translations (drafts and online) to determine whether it is O.K. to add a draft translation. If a draft translation does not exist, draft translation KAV objects are created under the following conditions:
i. If there is no online translation KAV for the requested language
1. Clone from the Master document (the master may be a draft or may be online). In performing the clone, standard fields such as channels, data category selections, and the title may be cloned or maybe marked with something like <To be translated>
2. Not cloned: create custom fields for the fields of the KAV.
ii. Else If there is an online translation KAV for the requested language
1. Clone from the master document upon a request for translation (the master may be a draft or may be online). During the cloning, standard fields such channels and data category selections are cloned.
2. Clone the title and custom fields from the online KAV translation.
iii. Insert new KAV translations
When a new draft version of an article is created or a new draft version of a translation is created, to save time and effort, first close of the master document or most recent version is created and may be used as the template for the new draft, and all of the field values are copied from the prior version or master document to the clone. Following the creation of the new KAV translations, the translation sub workflow is initialized for the new KAV translations. Finally, an assignment of the draft translation KAV objects is made to the requested user/queue with a specified due date.
To support DeleteDraftTranslations transition type for the management of translations in the KnowledgeArticle publishing process, the following changes to the mono-lingual workflow model and workflow engine may be required as follows. Parameters that support bulk operations are added such as: a list of article identifiers and the language of the articles {articleId, language}, a check that DeleteDraftTranslations is accessible from the current state and that the current user has the right to execute the transition, a query that finds existing draft translations for specified article ids and languages, which then deletes the draft translations.
In embodiments, the Publish, Archive, and RestoreToDraft may include options for creating a translation, publishing a translation, archiving a translation and restoring a translation to the draft state to handle translations. When a KnowledgeArticle (KA) is published and the master KAV is moved to online, an additional step is required. All draft KnowledgeArticleVersion (KAV) translations in the TranslationCompleted state for this version (same version number) should also be published, which may be done by joining to article query with a filter on completed_date!=null. If the article already existed online and is republished, new draft translations may replace existing online translation if a draft translation already existed for the same master document. However, if there are any existing online translations without a corresponding draft translation, the existing online translations should remain online. If what the publisher had said “impacts existing translations” while editing the draft master, an isOutOfDate flag may be cascaded to the remaining online translations at publication time (via a hidden flag maintained on the master).
The Archive transition type may include the following to handle translations. When a KA is archived and the master KAV is set to the Archived PublishStatus, translations of that article should also be set to Archived. Online translations may be archived. However, draft translations may be deleted (a user interface (UI) should provide explicit warning). All translations that are archived should exit the KAV Translation sub workflow.
The RestoreToDraft transition type may include the following to handle translations. When a KA is moved back to the draft state, a new master KAV draft is created. If a new draft translation is then requested, the new draft translation may be cloned from the corresponding archived translation if it exists. When new translations are created, the new translations may re-initialize the KAV Translation sub workflow and enter the TranslationInProgress state. When publishing a restored article, “extra” archived translations that aren't represented in the newly published translations may be moved back to the draft state. Archived translations that match a newly published translation may be deleted, as is the case with the archived master version.
It is noted that even if the workflow engine is capable of executing AddDraftTranslations in mass with any combination of article id and languages, the knowledge management UI may restrict the execution of AddDraftTranslations for performance reasons to allow either article ids in bulk for a specific language, or language in bulk for a specific article.
Returning to step 812, if at step 812 it is determined that the changes to the source document do impact the existing translations of the source document, then a determination is made at 816 if the source article was last modified at a date after the date exported for translation into one or more languages. If the source article was modified after the date a copy of the document was sent for translation, then an alert is displayed for affected languages (in step 818) on an article list hover, article edit/detail, translation list, translation edit/detail, and/or export overlay, for example, to indicate the that version of the article that was translated is out of date, and method 800 terminates. Returning to step 816, if the determination made at step 816 is that the source was an article that was last edited prior to being send to translation, then a determination is made at step 820 whether the source article was last modified at a date after the date that the translation was last modified. If the source article was last modified at a date after the translation was last modified date (820) then an alert is displayed for affected languages (in step 822) on the article list hover, article edit/detail, translation list, and/or translation edit/detail, because the translation is not longer valid, and method 800 terminates. Returning to step 820, if it is determined that the source article was not modified after the translation was last modified, then method 800 terminates without issuing any alerts in step 824. In another embodiment, although depicted as distinct steps in
Screenshots:
The knowledge management tasks may be achieved through two views and two editors: the master language view and editor, which provide the same features as the one available for mono-lingual Knowledge plus translation requests, and the translation view and editor, which allows a user to do tasks related to translating an article
In an embodiment, user actions available in the master language view may include: new, delete, assign, submit for translation, and publish. In master language view columns may include: title, language, type, assigned to (person in a queue), and due date (of translation). In master language view links may include: edit and preview.
In an embodiment, user actions available in the translation view may include: delete, assign, and publish translation. In translation view columns may include: title, language, ready for publication, type, assigned to (person in a queue), master title, Out of Sync flag, due date (of translation), last modification/translation date, last export date, and last import date. In translation view links may include: edit and preview. In translation view links may include: edit and preview.
Additional article actions that may be available in embodiments for managing and accessing a multilingual knowledge base include add translation, delete draft translation, and publish translation. The add translation may be used to request new translations of an article. The add translation action may be executed from the following places: from Master Draft View: Submit for translation; from Translated Draft View: Edit on ready for publication translations; from Master Online View: Submit for translation; and from Translated Online View: Edit. The add translation action may allow the content manager to keep or remove existing online translations. The delete draft translation may be available in Translated Draft View, and allows a user/system to delete an article translation. The publish translation action may be available in Translated Draft View, and allows a user/system to publish an article translation. It is noted that if the master version of an article is not yet been published, the article translation is moved to the status “ready for publication” and the translation may be published when the master version is published. It is noted that if the master version is published, the translation is then directly published.
Although article search tool 902, draft articles 904, article assignment menu 905, draft translations 906, published article selection 908, published article translations 910, archived articles 912, draft article filter 914, article language 916, category group 918, related links 920, article report link 922, export article for translation link 924, import translation link 926, view 928, view identifier 930, new article tab 932, assignment tab 934, request translation tab 936, publish tab 938, delete tab 940, columns tab 942, action column 944, article title column 946, type 948, translation column 950, assignment column 952, assignment due date 954, edit link 956, preview link 958, article title link 960 appear in
UI 900A may be a webpage or other form of a user interface generated on a display of a user device for article access and translation in an article management tab. Article search tool 902 may enable a user to search for articles and their translations according to the state of the article and/or the article's translations. For example, article search tool 902 may be capable of searching for an article or translation according to whether the article and/or translation is in the state of draft, published, and archived for both the master and that translated articles. The draft article 904 may display the different available queues. Draft articles 904 as selected in
Draft articles filter 914A may enable a user to add a keyword filter by entering a search term in the search box. The articles and/or translation returned will be those articles in the category selected, via article search tool 902 that includes the string entered via draft article filter 914A. In the embodiment shown in
Related links 920 may provide users with useful links related to managing multilingual articles. Article report link 922 may bring the user to a page for creating a report containing information about the status of various articles (e.g., whether each article is online, in the draft state, or archived) and/or may include information about the status of any translations (e.g, draft, ready to publish, online, or archived), via which the user with may track the status of the article and/or the article's translation. Export article for translation link 924 may provide a user with a link to a webpage or UI screen for exporting articles for translation and assigning the article to a queue or user. When an article is exported for translation, a copy of the article is sent to the translator or to a storage area to which a queue of translators has access, so that any translator in the queue may view, copy, and/or download the article, thereby allowing the translator to translate the article. Import translation link 926 may provide a user with a link to a webpage or UI screen for importing translations of articles that have been translated. In an embodiment, there may be a workspace and/or web portal, for example, where a translator may upload a finished translation. Once the finished translation is uploaded to the workspace or web portal or otherwise indicated as being complete, a tenant administrator may import the article to a storage area for translations in the ready to publish state.
View 928A may provide users with a tabular view of the articles selected via search tool 902 and draft articles filter 914A. The types of articles that are currently displayed in the view 928A may be based on the search selections chosen in draft translations 906, published article selection 908, published article translations 910, and archived articles 912 found in the article search tool 902, as will be shown in
Filter draft translation articles 914B may enable a user to search for articles that are in a draft translation state based on search parameters set in the filters. In the embodiment shown in
In response to the selection of draft translations 906, the view 928B may provide users with a tabular selection of actions for managing and viewing draft translations of articles in a multilingual knowledge base. The view identifier 930B in the embodiment of
Filter published articles 914C may enable a user to search for articles that are in a published state based on search parameters set in the filters. In the embodiment shown in
In response to the selection of published article view selection 908, the view 928C may provide users with a view of the articles selected via search tool 902 and draft articles filter 914C. The view identifier 930C in the embodiment of
Translation column 950 may provide a user with information on available translations of published articles. In the embodiment of
Filter published articles 914D may enable a user to search for articles that are in a published state based on search parameters set in the filters. In the embodiment shown in
In response to the selection of published translation view selection 910, the view 928 may provide users with a view of the articles selected via search tool 902 and draft articles filter 914A. The view identifier 930 in the embodiment of
Filter archived articles 914E may enable a user to search for articles that are in a archived state based on search parameters set in the filters. In the embodiment shown in
In response to the selection of archived article view selection 912, the view 928 may provide users with a view of the articles selected via search tool 902 and draft articles filter 914A. The view identifier 930 in the embodiment of
The screenshot of
In the embodiment of
The selection of the save tab 1106 may generate the overlay page 1154 of
Queue selection section 1180 allows a user to select translation queues that have articles they want to export. Queue pull down menu 1181 is a list of current export queues with articles to translate that may be selected. Select article in Queue section 1182 allows a user to select which articles in a selected queue to be exported. Article selection criteria 1183 are parameters of which articles to select from the selected queue to export. Administrative setup section 1184 provides management controls for various functions and users. Control categories 1185 are the various functions and users available for the administrator to control. Expander icons 1186 are selected to provide further subcategories under each of the control categories. The administrative setup section 1184 also appears in
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In embodiments, knowledge managers may utilize an article management tab to carryout tasks including create, edit, archive, delete, assign, and publish a master version of articles (a master version is the source article in a specific language, translations are then referred as translation versions). In addition, further tasks conducted with the article management tab include requesting translations of articles, editing, deleting, publishing, and assigning translation versions of the requested articles. The aforementioned tasks may be accomplished through two views and two editors, the master language view and editor, and the translation view and editor, which are illustrated and described in the screenshots of
In embodiments various page views or screens are available for managing and accessing a multi-lingual knowledge base in a database network system, which are shown in
In embodiments, the tasks of knowledge management that users may do within the article management tab of
In embodiments, knowledge managers may utilize an article management tab to carryout tasks including create, edit, archive, delete, assign, and publish a master version of articles (a master version is the source article in a specific language, translations are then referred as translation versions). In addition, further tasks conducted with the article management tab include requesting translations of articles, editing, deleting, publishing, and assigning translation versions of the requested articles. The finding and managing articles and translations may be accomplished through two views and two editors, the master language view and editor, and the translation view and editor, which will be discussed further in conjunction with the screenshots of
In at least one embodiment, some knowledge management features may not be handled through the article management tab. These knowledge management features correspond to the tasks that require a read-only access to the articles and their translations, such as providing an overview of the translation status of the KB, and filtering capabilities (which will be discussed further in conjunction with the screenshots of
To facilitate the filtering of articles in the knowledge base, custom tables containing article identifications and other types of relevant information for identifying an article and persons associated with the article may be provided in custom tables.
The columns of the custom tables as shown in Tables 1 and 2 may have the following information. Knowledge Article ID may provide a unique identifier for an article in a knowledgebase. Knowledge Article Version ID may provide an indication of which version or generation the article is presently available in the knowledgebase. Article title URL_Name is a link in the form of a universal resource locator (URL) for accessing an article in the knowledge base. Summary may provide a synopsis of an articles content or subject matter. Created by may detail who created or wrote the article. Created date may be the date that the article was first written. First published date may be the date that an article was first published. Last modified date may indicate the last date an article had content changed. Visible in customer portal may be an indicator if the article is available for selection in a customer's interface to the knowledge base. Visable in internal application may indicate whether the article is available for selection in the internal application. Visable in partner portal may indicate whether the article is available in a menu for selection and viewing in a partner portal. Visible in public knowledge base may indicate whether the article is available in a menu for selection and viewing in a public knowledge base. Language IsMaster may indicate whether the language an article is in is the master or primary first language. Publishing status may indicate the state of an article including online, draft, or archived. Import date may indicate the date an article was placed in a data base following translation. Export date may indicate a date an article was sent ou (exported for translation. Ready for publication may indicate that an article is ready for general distribution. Out of sync may indicate that a master version may be undergoing revisions while other versions of the article are out for translation, or other changes. Assign to may indicate which translator was given an article to translate or update. Due date may indicate a date an article is to have a translation or revision completed by. Instruction may be requirements sent to a translator. View Stat field may indicate how often or frequency an article is selected from the knowledge base. Vote Stat field may be a user vote to determine a rank of article by usefulness, timeliness or other parameters. Case Count may be a count of cases.
The data schema for the data object definition in the UDD, in pseudo-Data Definition Language (DDL) format, may include a command to create a table for the language of the article, which may include columns for an identifier of an organization, a language of the article, a status of the article (e.g., draft, online, or archive), an indicator for whether the a default language is set for the master document (which is filled in at the time of the creation of the article prior to the user having a chance to set the language), and an identifier for the default assignee. The pseudo Data Definition Language is in the format of a data definition language file, but may be an equivalent to a DDL file that runs on a JAVA virtual machine. In an embodiment, a table for tracking the article version may be included, which may have columns for an identifier for the master version of the article, a column indicating whether the articles are out of date, a column that stores the date when the translations were completed, a column for storing the dates when the translations were completed, a column for storing the dates when the translations were exported to the translator for translation, and a column for storing when the translations were imported back into the system. The table may be used for tracking the state of the articles and of the translations of the article. Specifically, in pseudo DDL format, the data object definition may include coding such as:
CREATE TABLE knowledge.language_config (organization_id, language, status, is_default_master_language, default_assignee_id), and
ALTER TABLE knowledge.article_version ADD (master_version_id, is_out_of_date, translation_completed_date, translation_exported_date, translation_imported_date)
In at least one embodiment, publication of article translations is controlled by assigning various permission levels or rights to users. Users with sufficient level of rights may submit articles for translation in some languages. As the costs of translating content are generally expensive, the careful selection of the target language(s) when requesting the translation of an article is a consideration. For example, an article may be linked to a product that is not distributed in Asia but in North America and Western Europe, and in that case the user may not want to request the translation in Chinese and other Asian languages, but in languages common to the target market. In an embodiment, the system may automatically determine which articles are good candidates for translations, and into which languages the article should be translated to. The determination may be based on criteria such as which articles may have the highest predicted return on investment (ROI), where for purposes of determining the ROI, the investment is the cost of translation. Some other factor that may determine whether to translate an article are which articles have the highest frequency of being referenced in a defined period of time, such as in the last 30 days and/or how often customers for translations. Selection tools may be provided via which an administrator may determine whether to request the translations suggested by the system. Alternatively, the administrator may make the determination of which article to have translated, without the system making the determination (and the determination may be based on criteria such as which articles may have the highest predicted ROI, the number of requests from customers for translations, and/or which articles have the highest frequency of being referenced in a defined period of time, such as in the last 30 days), and the administrator may then use the selection tool to request the translation.
In embodiments, articles for which translations have been requested and that are managed externally may be exported. The export may be done from within a node in a setup tree, (e.g., under application setup>data management that is accessed in the UI (the UI having features for exporting articles as shown and described in
System Overview
Environment 1810 is an environment in which an on-demand database service exists. User system 1812 may be any machine or system that is used by a user to access a database user system. For example, any of user systems 1812 may be a handheld computing device, a mobile phone, a laptop computer, a work station, and/or a network of computing devices. As illustrated in
An on-demand database service, such as system 1816, is a database system that is made available to outside users that do not need to necessarily be concerned with building and/or maintaining the database system, but instead may be available for their use when the users need the database system (e.g., on the demand of the users). Some on-demand database services may store information from one or more tenants stored into tables of a common database image to form a multi-tenant database system (MTS). Accordingly, “on-demand database service 1816” and “system 1816” will be used interchangeably herein. A database image may include one or more database objects. A relational database management system (RDMS) or the equivalent may execute storage and retrieval of information against the database object(s). Application platform 1818 may be a framework that allows the applications of system 1816 to run, such as the hardware and/or software, e.g., the operating system. In an embodiment, on-demand database service 1816 may include an application platform 1818 that enables creation, managing and executing one or more applications developed by the provider of the on-demand database service, users accessing the on-demand database service via user systems 1812, or third party application developers accessing the on-demand database service via user systems 1812.
The users of user systems 1812 may differ in their respective capacities, and the capacity of a particular user system 1812 might be entirely determined by permissions (permission levels) for the current user. For example, where a salesperson is using a particular user system 1812 to interact with system 1816 that user system has the capacities allotted to that salesperson. However, while an administrator is using that user system to interact with system 1816, that user system has the capacities allotted to that administrator. In systems with a hierarchical role model, users at one permission level may have access to applications, data, and database information accessible by a lower permission level user, but may not have access to certain applications, database information, and data accessible by a user at a higher permission level. Thus, different users will have different capabilities with regard to accessing and modifying application and database information, depending on a user's security or permission level.
Network 1814 is any network or combination of networks of devices that communicate with one another. For example, network 1814 may be any one or any combination of a LAN (local area network), WAN (wide area network), telephone network, wireless network, point-to-point network, star network, token ring network, hub network, or other appropriate configuration. As the most common type of computer network in current use is a TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) network, such as the global internetwork of networks often referred to as the “Internet” with a capital “I,” that network will be used in many of the examples herein. However, it should be understood that the networks that the one or more implementations might use are not so limited, although TCP/IP is a frequently implemented protocol.
User systems 1812 might communicate with system 1816 using TCP/IP and, at a higher network level, use other common Internet protocols to communicate, such as HTTP, FTP, AFS, WAP, etc. In an example where HTTP is used, user system 1812 might include an HTTP client commonly referred to as a “browser” for sending and receiving HTTP messages to and from an HTTP server at system 1816. Such an HTTP server might be implemented as the sole network interface between system 1816 and network 1814, but other techniques might be used as well or instead. In some implementations, the interface between system 1816 and network 1814 includes load sharing functionality, such as round-robin HTTP request distributors to balance loads and distribute incoming HTTP requests evenly over a plurality of servers. At least as for the users that are accessing that server, each of the plurality of servers has access to the MTS′ data; however, other alternative configurations may be used instead.
In one embodiment, system 1816, shown in
One arrangement for elements of system 1816 is shown in
Several elements in the system shown in
According to one embodiment, each user system 1812 and all of its components are operator configurable using applications, such as a browser, including computer code run using a central processing unit such as an Intel Pentium® processor or the like. Similarly, system 1816 (and additional instances of an MTS, where more than one is present) and all of their components might be operator configurable using application(s) including computer code to run using a central processing unit such as processor system 1817, which may include an Intel Pentium® processor or the like, and/or multiple processor units. A computer program product embodiment includes a machine-readable storage medium (media) having instructions stored thereon/in which may be used to program a computer to perform any of the processes of the embodiments described herein. Computer code for operating and configuring system 1816 to intercommunicate and to process webpages, applications and other data and media content as described herein are preferably downloaded and stored on a hard disk, but the entire program code, or portions thereof, may also be stored in any other volatile or non-volatile memory medium or device as is well known, such as a ROM or RAM, or provided on any media capable of storing program code, such as any type of rotating media including floppy disks, optical discs, digital versatile disk (DVD), compact disk (CD), microdrive, and magneto-optical disks, and magnetic or optical cards, nanosystems (including molecular memory ICs), or any type of media or device suitable for storing instructions and/or data. Additionally, the entire program code, or portions thereof, may be transmitted and downloaded from a software source over a transmission medium, e.g., over the Internet, or from another server, as is well known, or transmitted over any other conventional network connection as is well known (e.g., extranet, VPN, LAN, etc.) using any communication medium and protocols (e.g., TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTPS, Ethernet, etc.) as are well known. It will also be appreciated that computer code for implementing embodiments may be implemented in any programming language that may be executed on a client system and/or server or server system such as, for example, C, C++, HTML, any other markup language, Java™, JavaScript, ActiveX, any other scripting language, such as VBScript, and many other programming languages as are well known may be used. (Java™ is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.).
According to one embodiment, each system 1816 is configured to provide webpages, forms, applications, data and media content to user (client) systems 1812 to support the access by user systems 1812 as tenants of system 1816. As such, system 1816 provides security mechanisms to keep each tenant's data separate unless the data is shared. If more than one MTS is used, they may be located in close proximity to one another (e.g., in a server farm located in a single building or campus), or they may be distributed at locations remote from one another (e.g., one or more servers located in city A and one or more servers located in city B). As used herein, each MTS could include one or more logically and/or physically connected servers distributed locally or across one or more geographic locations. Additionally, the term “server” is meant to include a computer system, including processing hardware and process space(s), and an associated storage system and database application (e.g., OODBMS or RDBMS) as is well known in the art. It should also be understood that “server system” and “server” are often used interchangeably herein. Similarly, the database object described herein may be implemented as single databases, a distributed database, a collection of distributed databases, a database with redundant online or offline backups or other redundancies, etc., and might include a distributed database or storage network and associated processing intelligence.
User system 1812, network 1814, system 1816, tenant data storage 1822, and system data storage 1824 were discussed above in
Application platform 1818 includes an application setup mechanism 1938 that supports application developers' creation and management of applications, which may be saved as metadata into tenant data storage 1822 by save routines 1936 for execution by subscribers as one or more tenant process spaces 1804 managed by tenant management process 1810 for example. Invocations to such applications may be coded using PL/SOQL 1934 that provides a programming language style interface extension to API 1932. A detailed description of some PL/SOQL language embodiments is discussed in commonly owned co-pending U.S. Provisional Patent Application 60/828,192 entitled, PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR EXTENDING APIS TO EXECUTE IN CONJUNCTION WITH DATABASE APIS, by Craig Weissman, filed Oct. 4, 2006, which is incorporated in its entirety herein for all purposes. Invocations to applications may be detected by one or more system processes, which manage retrieving application metadata 1816 for the subscriber making the invocation and executing the metadata as an application in a virtual machine.
Each application server 1900 may be communicably coupled to database systems, e.g., having access to system data 1925 and tenant data 1923, via a different network connection. For example, one application server 19001 might be coupled via the network 1814 (e.g., the Internet), another application server 1900N-1 might be coupled via a direct network link, and another application server 1900N might be coupled by yet a different network connection. Transfer Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) are typical protocols for communicating between application servers 1900 and the database system. However, it will be apparent to one skilled in the art that other transport protocols may be used to optimize the system depending on the network interconnect used.
In certain embodiments, each application server 1900 is configured to handle requests for any user associated with any organization that is a tenant. Because it is desirable to be able to add and remove application servers from the server pool at any time for any reason, there is preferably no server affinity for a user and/or organization to a specific application server 1900. In one embodiment, therefore, an interface system implementing a load balancing function (e.g., an F5 Big-IP load balancer) is communicably coupled between the application servers 1900 and the user systems 1812 to distribute requests to the application servers 1900. In one embodiment, the load balancer uses a least connections algorithm to route user requests to the application servers 1900. Other examples of load balancing algorithms, such as round robin and observed response time, also may be used. For example, in certain embodiments, three consecutive requests from the same user could hit three different application servers 1900, and three requests from different users could hit the same application server 1900. In this manner, system 1816 is multi-tenant, wherein system 1816 handles storage of, and access to, different objects, data and applications across disparate users and organizations.
As an example of storage, one tenant might be a company that employs a sales force where each salesperson uses system 1816 to manage their sales process. Thus, a user might maintain contact data, leads data, customer follow-up data, performance data, goals and progress data, etc., all applicable to that user's personal sales process (e.g., in tenant data storage 1822). In an example of a MTS arrangement, since all of the data and the applications to access, view, modify, report, transmit, calculate, etc., may be maintained and accessed by a user system having nothing more than network access, the user may manage his or her sales efforts and cycles from any of many different user systems. For example, if a salesperson is visiting a customer and the customer has Internet access in their lobby, the salesperson may obtain critical updates as to that customer while waiting for the customer to arrive in the lobby.
While each user's data might be separate from other users' data regardless of the employers of each user, some data might be organization-wide data shared or accessible by a plurality of users or all of the users for a given organization that is a tenant. Thus, there might be some data structures managed by system 1816 that are allocated at the tenant level while other data structures might be managed at the user level. Because an MTS might support multiple tenants including possible competitors, the MTS should have security protocols that keep data, applications, and application use separate. Also, because many tenants may opt for access to an MTS rather than maintain their own system, redundancy, up-time, and backup are additional functions that may be implemented in the MTS. In addition to user-specific data and tenant specific data, system 1816 might also maintain system level data usable by multiple tenants or other data. Such system level data might include industry reports, news, postings, and the like that are sharable among tenants.
In certain embodiments, user systems 1812 (which may be client systems) communicate with application servers 1900 to request and update system-level and tenant-level data from system 1816 that may require sending one or more queries to tenant data storage 1822 and/or system data storage 1824. System 1816 (e.g., an application server 1900 in system 1816) automatically generates one or more SQL statements (e.g., one or more SQL queries) that are designed to access the desired information. System data storage 1824 may generate query plans to access the requested data from the database.
Each database may generally be viewed as a collection of objects, such as a set of logical tables, containing data fitted into predefined categories. A “table” is one representation of a data object, and may be used herein to simplify the conceptual description of objects and custom objects. It should be understood that “table” and “object” may be used interchangeably herein. Each table generally contains one or more data categories logically arranged as columns or fields in a viewable schema. Each row or record of a table contains an instance of data for each category defined by the fields. For example, a CRM database may include a table that describes a customer with fields for basic contact information such as name, address, phone number, fax number, etc. Another table might describe a purchase order, including fields for information such as customer, product, sale price, date, etc. In some multi-tenant database systems, standard entity tables might be provided for use by all tenants. For CRM database applications, such standard entities might include tables for Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity data, each containing pre-defined fields. It should be understood that the word “entity” may also be used interchangeably herein with “object” and “table”.
In some multi-tenant database systems, tenants may be allowed to create and store custom objects, or they may be allowed to customize standard entities or objects, for example by creating custom fields for standard objects, including custom index fields. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/8,128,161, filed Apr. 2, 2004, entitled “Custom Entities and Fields in a Multi-Tenant Database System”, and which is hereby incorporated herein by reference, teaches systems and methods for creating custom objects as well as customizing standard objects in a multi-tenant database system. In certain embodiments, for example, all custom entity data rows are stored in a single multi-tenant physical table, which may contain multiple logical tables per organization. It is transparent to customers that their multiple “tables” are in fact stored in one large table or that their data may be stored in the same table as the data of other customers.
Method for Using the Environment (
Method for Creating the Environment (
In step 2104, system 1816 (
In step 2106, user system 1812 is communicatively coupled to network 1904. In step 2108, system 1816 is communicatively coupled to network 1904 allowing user system 1812 and system 1816 to communicate with one another (
While one or more implementations have been described by way of example and in terms of the specific embodiments, it is to be understood that one or more implementations are not limited to the disclosed embodiments. To the contrary, it is intended to cover various modifications and similar arrangements as would be apparent to those skilled in the art. Therefore, the scope of the appended claims should be accorded the broadest interpretation so as to encompass all such modifications and similar arrangements.
In an alternate embodiment, a CRUD delete for translations may be used instead of directly using DeleteDraftTranslations through an API by implementing the delete verb that simply delegates to the DeleteDraftTranslations transition in a validation hook, which would as described above correctly ensures that based on the current state and user this operation would be allowed, before proceeding with the UDD delete call.
Each embodiment disclosed herein may be used or otherwise combined with any of the other embodiments disclosed. Any element of any embodiment may be used in any embodiment.
Although the invention has been described with reference to specific embodiments, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that various changes may be made and equivalents may be substituted for elements thereof without departing from the true spirit and scope of the invention. In addition, modifications may be made without departing from the essential teachings of the invention.
This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/272,015, entitled “MULTI-LINGUAL KNOWLEDGE BASE,” by Etienne Giraudy, filed on Oct. 12, 2011 (Docket No. 48-63/636US); which, in turn, claims priority benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application 61/499,878, entitled “MULTI-LINGUAL KNOWLEDGE BASE,” by Etienne Giraudy, filed on Jun. 22, 2011 (Docket No. 48-62/636PROV), and the entire contents of both are incorporated herein by reference. The following commonly owned, co-pending United States patents and patent applications, including the present application, are related to each other. Each of the other patents/applications are incorporated by reference herein in its entirety: U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/272,015, entitled “MULTI-LINGUAL KNOWLEDGE BASE,” by Etienne Giraudy, filed on Oct. 12, 2011 (Docket No. 48-63/636US); U.S. Provisional Patent Application 61/499,878, entitled “MULTI-LINGUAL KNOWLEDGE BASE,” by Etienne Giraudy, filed on Jun. 22, 2011 (Docket No. 48-62/636PROV), and the entire contents of both are incorporated herein by reference; U.S. patent application Ser. No. ______, entitled “MULTI-LINGUAL KNOWLEDGE BASE,” by Etienne Giraudy, filed on Oct. 4, 2012 (Docket No. 48-78/636US2).
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 13272015 | Oct 2011 | US |
| Child | 13645503 | US |
