abstract |
Method and apparatus to enable scanning one or more documents, automatically identifying significant key topics, concepts, and phrases in the documents, and creating summary pages for, and hyperlinks between, some or all of these key topics. Optionally, documents are divided into segments, in order that only the needed segment of a hyperlinked-to document need be transferred to a viewer's display. A process running on a computer can be used which (a) allows an author to select source documents and then, using a semantic analyzer program running on a computer, (b) automatically identifies significant key topics within the selected documents, (c) compiles those key topics into summary pages, (d) generates presentation pages and optionally segmenting the selected documents into smaller pieces, and (e) embeds hyperlinks from these summary pages to the locations where key topics appear in the presentation pages. Different types of summary-page are available, including abstract, concept, phrase, and table-of-contents summary pages. A summary page provides an index into the source document, and can be appended to the source document. A method of using a computer to hyperlink through automatically generated hyperlinks, and a data structure which can be used to support such hyperlinking are described. |