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Expanding the scope of an annotation to an entity levelExpanding the scope of an annotation to an entity level description/claimsThe Patent Description & Claims data below is from USPTO Patent Application 20080126328, Expanding the scope of an annotation to an entity level. Brief Patent Description - Full Patent Description - Patent Application Claims
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
This is a divisional of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/664,537 filed on Sep. 19, 2003, which is herein incorporated by reference. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to the field of data entry and retrieval and, more particularly, to a method and system for associating annotations with entities associated with a data object related to the annotation. 2. Description of the Related Art There are well known methods for capturing and storing explicit knowledge as data, for example, in relational databases, documents, flat files, and various proprietary formats in binary files. Often, such data is analyzed by various parties (e.g., experts, technicians, managers, etc.), resulting in rich interpretive information, commonly referred to as tacit knowledge. However, such tacit knowledge is often only temporarily captured, for example, as cryptic notes in a lab notebook, discussions/conversations, presentations, instant messaging exchanges, e-mails and the like. Because this tacit knowledge is typically not captured in the application environment in which the related data is viewed and analyzed, it is often lost. One approach to more permanently capture tacit knowledge is to create annotations containing descriptive information about data objects. Virtually any identifiable type of object may be annotated, such as a matrix of data (e.g., a spreadsheet or database table), a text document, or an image. Further, subportions of objects (sub-objects) may be annotated, such as a cell, row, or column in a database table or a section, paragraph, or word in a text document. An indexing scheme is typically used to map each annotation to the annotated data object or sub-object, based on identifying information, typically in the form of an index. The index should provide enough specificity to allow the indexing scheme to locate the annotated data object (or sub-object). Further, to be effective, the indexing scheme should work both ways: given an index, the indexing scheme must be able to locate the annotated data object and, given an object, the indexing scheme must be able to calculate the index for use in classification, comparison, and searching (e.g., to search for annotations for a given data object). In many situations, portions of a collection of data, such as database rows, are roughly analogous to ‘entities’ or objects. As an example, a table with patient records may have a primary key which is a patient number (patient ID) and would likely also have a patient name (first and last), address, preferences, and the like. All the other information for a particular row may be regarded as being related to a ‘patient entity’ uniquely identified by the patient ID. Similarly, all the information for a particular row of information in a table of test results may be regarded as being related to a ‘test result entity.’ Some information may be related to more than one entity. For example, a patient's test results may be related to both patient and test results entities. Further, information related to a single entity may be contained in multiple tables. For example, demographic information related to a patient entity may be contained in a table of patient records, while test results for the same patient entity may be contained in a table of test results. One potential problem, however, presented when capturing and sharing information in an annotation, is selecting the proper scope of an annotation describing data related to an entity. The problem may be described with reference to the table of exemplary query results (listing patient test results) shown in Table I below.
TABLE I
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