Patent ID: 9229610
Filing Date: 2016-01-05
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. In a computing environment containing electronic content items, a computer-implemented method for identifying and graphically depicting relationships between electronic content items, the method comprising: receiving electronic content comprised of at least one item; analyzing the received electronic content to identify characteristics of the received electronic content; applying a relationship hierarchy, the relationship hierarchy ranking characteristics for determining relationships between electronic content items, wherein a first characteristic is ranked above a second characteristic in the relationship hierarchy; determining, by a processor, relationships between the received electronic content and electronic content items previously received from multiple users using multiple computing devices, wherein the received electronic content is determined to be more closely related to a first previously-received electronic content item with which it shares the first characteristic than to a second previously-received electronic content item with which it shares the second characteristic, based on the relationship hierarchy ranking of the first characteristic above the second characteristic; and providing for display, on graphical user interfaces of multiple computing devices, a combination of the received and previously-received electronic content items, and graphics identifying the relationships between the received electronic content and the previously-received electronic content items, wherein the graphics depict that the received electronic content is more closely related to the first previously-received electronic content item than to the second previously-received electronic content item, and wherein the graphics permit multiple users of the multiple computing devices to collaborate using the combination and identified relationships.