Patent ID: 6564254
Filing Date: 2003-05-13
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
A system for specifying a location on a communications network for use by a network application installed in a computer, at least one of said network and said computer having a database that accumulates a plurality of sets of symbols and location information associated thereto, said system comprising:a symbol capturer that captures a symbol arbitrarily specified by a user on a display of the man-machine interface of said computer; a search request generator that generates a search request for a location information associated to said symbol which is captured by said symbol capturer; and a search request sender that sends said search request to said network application, thereby causing said network application to send said search request to said database and to receive from said database said location information associated to said symbol which is captured by said symbol capturer; wherein: said computer has a keyboard-type input apparatus including a conversion key and an okay key, and an input method editor that has a buffer for temporarily retaining a character or a character string which is entered from said keyboard-type input apparatus, that performs a conversion of said character or character string retained in said buffer in response to a user operation on said conversion key, and that transfers said character or character string retained in said buffer to an application being active on said display of said man-machine interface in response to a user operation on said okay key, said symbol capturer is able to capture a character or a character string retained in said buffer of said input method editor while an application other than said network application is active on said display of said man-machine interface.