US PATENTS: Cardona, System and method for database retrieval, indexing and statistical analysis

[Gretchen Whitney]

US Patent 6,385,611
Dated May 7, 2002
Inventor: Cardona; Carlos (P.O. Box 22892, Seattle, WA 98122-0892)

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ABSTRACT:

The present invention provides a system and method with the capacity to
compare and analyze keywords of a specific area of study.
By the use of the methods of the present invention, some sets of keywords
will be seen as "warming up" due to their upward trends,
whereas other keywords might be seen as "cooling down" due to their
downward trends. Given the accepted fact that growing areas of
research are the ones that are more likely to produce scientific
breakthroughs, the system identifies these emerging ("hot") areas of
research would accelerate the scientific advances of their
users. Similarly, users will be able to view and shift from non-productive
("cool") areas of research to productive "hot" areas. The invention
involves the utilization of a commercially available database
program and provides specific keywords associated with the investigated
topic. The present invention also provides a method for
indexing the keywords using a keyword tree structure database so the data
is in the correct format for analysis. The invention also
provides a method for analyzing the number of occurrences of keywords
along with the analysis of an impact factor associated with
the keywords. The formatted data then allows the construction of several
charts so a user can easily assess the state and forefront of a
specified topic.

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Gretchen Whitney, PhD                                     tel 865.974.7919
School of Information Sciences                            fax 865.974.4967
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA           gwhitney at utk.edu
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
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