METHOD FOR EXTRACTING DIGESTS REFORMATTING AND AUTOMATIC MONITORING OF STRUCTURED ONLINE DOCUMENTS BASED ON VISUAL PROGRAMMING OF DOCUMENT TREE NAVIGATION AND TRANSFORMATION

摘要

A method for extracting digests, reformatting, and automatic monitoring ofstructured online documents based on visual programming of document treenavigation and transformation is provided for structured online documents suchas HTML, XML, SGML document or any document that has internal structure thatcan be represented by a tree. A digest of an online document is a collectionof fragments (30) of this document which are of interest to a user. The systemis based on a technique whereby a user selects a fragment of an onlinedocument shown in a source window (10) and copies this fragment to a targetwindow (70) that contains the formatting digest. The system generates asequence of web site navigation commands, online navigation tree commands andfragments commands that cause the assemble of the reformatted digest in thetarget window (20). The user can later ask the system to replay the generatedcommands, thus causing the automatic creation of the reformatted digest of thechanged version of the online document. The digest documents can be displayedby user agents running on wireless and portable computer devices that havebandwidth and computational power limitations.