Patent ID: 6014679
Filing Date: 2000-01-11
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
An item selecting apparatus, comprising:information receiving means for receiving pieces of information relating to a particular page;link managing means for extracting pieces of link information respectively indicating a link relationship between the particular page and a reference page from the pieces of information received by the information receiving means, treating the pieces of link information as a plurality of items and managing a positional relationship among the items in the particular page;two-dimensional map preparing means for preparing a two-dimensional map indicating a relative positional relationship between each pair of items according to the positional relationship among the items managed by the link managing means;image preparing means for determining a display layout of the pieces of information received by the information receiving means while maintaining the positional relation among the items managed by the link managing means and preparing an image of the pieces of information, in which the items are included, according to the display layout;image displaying means for displaying the image of the pieces of information prepared by the image preparing means;instruction receiving means for receiving an upper instruction indicating a change of a remarked item of the image displayed by the image displaying means to an item placed on the upper side of the remarked item, a lower instruction indicating a change of the remarked item to an item placed on the lower side of the remarked item, a right instruction indicating a change of the remarked item to an item placed on the right side of the remarked item or a left instruction indicating a change of the remarked item to an item placed on the left side of the remarked item and receiving a selection instruction; anditem specifying and selecting means for specifying a particular item placed on the upper side of the remarked item in the two-dimensional map prepared by the two-dimensional map preparing means in cases where the upper instruction is received by the instruction receiving means, specifying a particular item placed on the lower side of the remarked item in the two-dimensional map prepared by the two-dimensional map preparing means in cases where the lower instruction is received by the instruction receiving means, specifying a particular item placed on the right side of the remarked item in the two-dimensional map prepared by the two-dimensional map preparing means in cases where the right instruction is received by the instruction receiving means, specifying a particular item placed on the left side of the remarked item in the two-dimensional map prepared by the two-dimensional map preparing means in cases where the left instruction is received by the instruction receiving means, and selecting the particular item in cases where the selection instruction is received by the instruction receiving means.