Patent ID: 9424295
Filing Date: 2016-08-23
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A method of relating documents, the method comprising: providing in a memory a first table-of-contents (TOC) data structure that includes a plurality of parent nodes and a plurality of child nodes, each child node being associated with one parent node to define a parent-child node pair for each combination of each child node and one parent node, and each child node further being associated with a document identifier that uniquely identifies a document in a document collection; defining in the memory a second TOC data structure that includes a plurality of relationship records, each relationship record including a parent-child node pair of the first TOC data structure and a unique identifier that uniquely identifies a relationship of the parent-child node pair of the first TOC data structure; and associating a rank indicator with each unique identifier in the second TOC data structure that indicates an order of each child node in the child-node pair of the first TOC data structure in relation to a sibling child node in another child-node pair in the first TOC data structure.