Abstract:
Disclosed is a system, method, and computer program product for allowing an entity to access social media data, and to perform term analysis upon that data. The approach is capable of accessing data across multiple types of internet-based sources of social data and commentary. A user interface is provided that allows the user to view and interact with the results of performing term analysis.

Description:
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS 
       [0001]    The present application claims the benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/897,089, filed on Oct. 29, 2013, entitled, “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PERFORMING TERM ANALYSIS IN SOCIAL DATA”, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. 
     
    
     BACKGROUND 
       [0002]    Given the widespread availability and usage of the internet by consumers, many businesses have become interested in being able to effectively monitor the content and commentary provided by such consumers. Interactive websites such as social networks and blogs provide a wealth of useful information that can be advantageously used by a business. 
         [0003]    It is possible to monitor the content of social media sites to identify the ranges of topics that are being commented about by users on the sites. By knowing about and understanding these topics, many businesses can then act upon that information to increase sales and revenue. It would be very desirable to allow the businesses to stay informed of actionable social networking content, for example, to identify potential customers and possible sales leads or to identify problematic situations that may require immediate involvement of customer service personnel. 
         [0004]    For example, consider a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application, which is designed to facilitate the ability of a business to create, develop, and build relationships with its customers or potential customers. It would be very desirable to allow the business CRM application to stay informed of actionable social networking content, for example, to identify potential customers and possible sales leads. 
         [0005]    As another example, brand managers are often interested in monitoring commentary on the internet regarding their brands or competitors&#39; brands. Brand managers may read the commentary to gauge interest in their marketing materials, receive feedback regarding their products, or take further action regarding any postings that warrant some type of follow-up response. 
         [0006]    Embodiments of the present invention provide a system, method, and computer program product for allowing an entity to access social media data, and to perform term analysis upon that data. The invention is capable of accessing data across multiple types of internet-based sources of social data and commentary. A user interface is provided that allows the user to view and interact with the results of performing term analysis. 
         [0007]    Other additional objects, features, and advantages of the invention are described in the detailed description, figures, and claims. 
     
    
     
       BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE FIGURES 
         [0008]      FIG. 1  illustrates a system to implement trend analysis over social media data according to embodiments of the invention. 
           [0009]      FIG. 2  shows a flowchart of an approach to perform term analysis according to some embodiments of the invention. 
           [0010]      FIG. 3  shows a flowchart of an example approach to implement sampling. 
           [0011]      FIG. 4  shows a flowchart of an approach to perform tokenizing according to some embodiments of the invention. 
           [0012]      FIG. 5  shows a flowchart of an approach to implement categorization according to some embodiments of the invention. 
           [0013]      FIG. 6  shows a flowchart of an approach to process the data for display. 
           [0014]      FIGS. 7-11  are examples of user interfaces that can be used to display and control the term analysis to the user. 
           [0015]      FIG. 12  shows an example interface for selecting a specific language for analysis for a given topic. 
           [0016]      FIG. 13  shows an example dashboard for the analysis in the selected language. 
           [0017]      FIG. 14   a - d  show example interfaces for displaying term analysis results based on the selected language. 
           [0018]      FIG. 15  depicts a computerized system on which an embodiment of the invention can be implemented. 
       
    
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION 
       [0019]    The present disclosure is directed to an approach for performing term analysis of data. The invention performs analysis upon a set of data to identify the type, frequency, and context for terms that are used within the data. This type of analysis can be used to more accurately and comprehensively understand the significance of data retrieved and reviewed from various sources. 
         [0020]    Consider if it is desired to perform analysis upon data from one or more social media sites. The analysis may be performed for any suitable purpose. For example, consider the situation where a marketer wishes to perform sentiment analysis for a given topic. The sentiment analysis will analyze a set of data from the social media sites, and will attempt to identify which of the content (e.g., posting, messages, blogs, etc.) provides either a positive or negative sentiment for the topic of interest. 
         [0021]      FIG. 7  illustrates an example interface for viewing the results of performing analysis upon data from social media sites for a given topic (e.g., using a social relationship management tool such as the SRM product available from Oracle Corporation of Redwood Shores, Calif.). This example interface shows a dashboard  700  containing an interface portion  702  for visually displaying the sentiment analysis results for a topic of interest (e.g., the “Obama” topic). Within the interface portion  702 , results are displayed that indicate the percentage/number of the analyzed content that expresses a positive sentiment ( 704 ), neutral sentiment ( 706 ), or negative sentiment ( 708 ). 
         [0022]    In conjunction with this sentiment analysis, the present invention provides a mechanism for allowing the user to better understand the context of the content that provides the underpinnings for the sentiment analysis. The way this is accomplished is by identifying the terms that most frequently appear within the content that correlate to the identified sentiment(s). 
         [0023]    To explain, assume that the user is interested in drilling down further into the set of content that underlies the “positive” sentiment for the topic of interest.  FIG. 8  illustrates an example interface  800  that can be used to display the results of performing this term analysis. Interface  800  can be configured to include several distinct interface portions. 
         [0024]    Interface portion  804  contains a listing of the top n (e.g., top  50 ) terms that appear within the set of content that tracks to the “positive” sentiment. Each of the terms may be visualized or highlighted in a way to provide further information about that term. For example, the size of the font for the displayed term can be selected to indicate the relative frequency of that term within the content (e.g., where a larger font size indicates greater frequency for the term). In addition, having the mouse hover over a given term can be used to control a further display of information for the term (e.g., by having a ghosted window display the exact number of times that the term appears within the content). 
         [0025]    Interface portion  806  displays some or all of the underlying content that corresponds to one of the terms displayed in portion  804 . When one of the terms is selected, portion  806  displays the underlying content, which the user can scroll through to review the exact wording that gives rise to the sentiment analysis. In some embodiments, the displayed content comprises a “snippet”, which may not be the entirety of the content. Instead, the snippet may only contain a given number of words on either side of the occurrence of the word/topic of interest within the content. For example, if the topic of interest is “Obama”, then snippets can be created that extend 200 words in either direction from any suitable occurrence of the word “Obama” within the underlying content. The snippets in interface portion  806  may be displayed in any desired order, e.g., ordered by time, date, size, content significance, etc. 
         [0026]    Interface portion  802  identifies and controls the “type” of the terms that are identified within the content. In the present embodiment, one selectable option is to display all of the terms that are identified for the term analysis (e.g., “everything” option). Another possible option is to only display action-related terms (e.g., by selecting the “actions” option in interface portion  802 , as shown in  FIG. 9 ). Yet another option is to only display description-related terms (e.g., by selecting the “descriptions” option in interface portion  802 , as shown in  FIG. 10 ). Another option is to only display things-related terms (e.g., by selecting the “things” option in interface portion  802 , as shown in  FIG. 11 ). 
         [0027]      FIG. 1  illustrates an example system  100  which may be employed in some embodiments of the invention to implement term analysis. The system includes one or more users at one or more user stations  102  that operate the system. The user station  102  comprises any type of computing station that may be used to operate or interface with the applications in the system. Examples of such user stations  102  include, for example, workstations, personal computers, or remote computing terminals. The user station  102  comprises a display device, such as a display monitor, for displaying a user interface to users at the user station. The user station  102  also comprises one or more input devices for the user to provide operational control over the activities of the system  100 , such as a mouse or keyboard to manipulate a pointing object in a graphical user interface to generate user inputs to the enterprise application  104  and/or trend analysis tool  106 . 
         [0028]    A semantic analyzer  108  receives data from one or more online social data sources  104 . Such social data sources  104  include, for example, websites such as a social network, blog or web feed (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and RSS). The content may include one or more comments (e.g., Facebook comment, comment to a blog post, reply to a previous comment) or uploaded postings (e.g., images and associated metadata, text, rich media, URLs) at one or more sources. The social data/content may therefore comprise a variety of forms and/or types. 
         [0029]    Semantic analysis is performed upon the social media data by the semantic analyzer  108 . The semantic analyzer  108  may be implemented as a standalone tool, or can be included as a component within another tool, e.g., a social relationship management tool. 
         [0030]    In some embodiments, the semantic analyzer  108  comprises a theme analyzer  122  to identify themes within the social media data. Themes can be identified, for example, by performing semantic analysis and identifying semantic clusters within the analyzed data. The semantic clusters correspond to themes within the social media data. 
         [0031]    For example, latent semantic analysis (LSA), an advanced form of statistical language modeling, can be used to perform semantic analysis upon the content. This permits the system to understand the contextual and semantic significance of terms that appear within the social data. For example semantic analysis can be used to understand the difference between the term “Galaxy” used in the author writing for astronomy content, and “Galaxy” in the author writing to refer to the name of a professional soccer team. 
         [0032]    Classification of the results is then performed on the analyzed data. Performing semantic analysis along with classification to the social media data permits the system to create and identify themes, and to cluster together like-minded messages, topics, conversations, and content from the authors. This action is performed by categorizing the subjects of the analyzed content. 
         [0033]    In some embodiments, the social data content is subject to semantic filtering to reduce the excess “noise” of irrelevant data. Semantic filtering is a mechanism that is provided to minimize miss-categorizations of the social data. Much of the social data is likely to contain content which is of very little interest. Semantic filtering is used to remove the irrelevant material from the social data to reduce the occurrence of false positives, false negatives, and inappropriate responses/rejections within the actionable data. This permits the resulting data to be more relevant and accurate. 
         [0034]    An example approach that can be taken to implement theme analysis is described in U.S. Provisional Application 61/909,076, filed on Nov. 26, 2013, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. 
         [0035]    A term analyzer  124  is the component that is employed to perform term analysis. The term analyzer  124  comprises one or more language engines ( 126 - 1  to  126 - n ), each of which provides the services to perform term analysis for a respective language. The operations of the term analyzer  124  are described in more detail below. 
         [0036]    A user interface component  120  generates the content that is visually displayed to a user at user station  102 . This content includes, for example, the interface elements shown in  FIGS. 7-11 . The user interface component  120  may also be used to retrieve user inputs through the user interface to control the operations of the term analyzer  124 . 
         [0037]    The term analysis results, data from the social media sources  104 , and/or snippets  112  can be stored into a database in a computer readable storage device  110 . The computer readable storage device  110  comprises any combination of hardware and software that allows for ready access to the data that is located at the computer readable storage device. For example, the computer readable storage device  110  could be implemented as computer memory operatively managed by an operating system. The computer readable storage device could also be implemented as an electronic database system having storage on persistent and/or non-persistent storage. 
         [0038]      FIG. 2  shows a flowchart of an approach to perform term analysis according to some embodiments of the invention. At  202 , sampling is performed to obtain data to analyze for term analysis. The general idea is that, instead of performing term analysis upon the entirety of the data, the analysis can be performed for a selected sampling of the data. Assuming that the samples are properly extracted from the underlying content, the sampled data should provide a reasonably representative sample of data for the analysis. For example, a sample size of 500-1000 can be retrieved in some embodiments to perform the sampling. In an alternative embodiment, sampling is not employed—this approach analyzes all of the underlying content. 
         [0039]    For each data item/document that is sampled at  202 , the actions  204  are performed. These actions include tokenizing for each of the data items/documents at  206 . For each of the tokens identified at  206 , the actions of  208  are performed. This includes categorizing of the token and/or its related content into the appropriate category, e.g., into the “actions”, “descriptions”, or “things” category. 
         [0040]    Thereafter, at  212 , the categorized data is processed for display to the user in the user interface.  FIGS. 8-11  illustrate example interfaces that can be used to display the results of performing term analysis to a user. 
         [0041]    As noted above, sampling can be performed to obtain data to analyze for term analysis (step  202 ). In some embodiments, the sampling is performed in response to user controls to begin the analysis. For example, from the dashboard  700  of  FIG. 7 , the user may be desirous of performing the analysis for a given location within the “Activity” chart (e.g., at one of the peak locations). The interface  700  can therefore be configured to begin the analysis upon user selection of a given position within the activity chart portion of the interface  700 . This creates a “request” for term analysis that corresponds to a “session” having a corresponding “session ID”. The analysis can also be initiated from other portions of the interface  700  as well, e.g., from the portion  702  that pertains to sentiment. 
         [0042]      FIG. 3  shows a flowchart of an example approach to implement sampling. At  302 , the approach extracts a number of data items/documents from the database. In some embodiments, snippets are extracted from the database, where each snippet comprises a certain number of content (e.g., 400 words) that are centered around a word of interest. 
         [0043]    The snippets are randomly extracted from the database, to facilitate statistical correctness for the content that is selected for sampling. The number of samples is selected to balance the need for enough samples to allow correlation of analysis results to the entire data population, while limiting the numbers needed for analysis to optimize performance. In some embodiments, 500-1000 snippets are randomly sampled. 
         [0044]    At  304 , the sampled documents are sent to a language-specific term-processing service. In some embodiments, the sampled documents are held by the system in a way that correspond the documents to a given session ID—the session ID for the request that causes the documents to be sampled. Therefore, the documents are stored in a manner that correspond to the session, and for which a session ID may be returned. 
         [0045]    At  306 , the request is made for term analysis on the documents corresponding to the session, e.g., where the request includes the respective session ID associated with the documents. One reason to take this approach is for embodiments that may perform both theme analysis and term analysis, where the underlying documents may be held and possibly analyzed for either analysis. In this situation, the additional request is made to perform term analysis on the documents. Thereafter, at  308 , the documents are extracted from the session. 
         [0046]    As noted above, for each of the documents, tokenizing is performed (at step  206 ).  FIG. 4  shows a flowchart of an approach to perform tokenizing according to some embodiments of the invention. At  402 , the document is tokenized using a language-specific tokenizer. Lexical analysis is performed to convert the sequence of individual characters from the document into tokens. Since each different language has its own unique set of lexical structure and content, a language-specific tokenizer is employed to perform the tokenizing process for documents in the respective languages. 
         [0047]    At  404 , filtering is performed on the identified tokens. The filtering is used to remove stop words from the list of tokens. Such stop words may include, for example, “and”, “or”, “the”, “to”, “be”, “is”, “at”. 
         [0048]    Categorization can then be performed on each of the identified and filtered tokens (step  210 ).  FIG. 5  shows a flowchart of an approach to implement categorization according to some embodiments of the invention. At  502 , the token is analyzed based on its part of speech, where a determination is made whether the token is a noun, verb, or adjective/adverb. As noted above, some embodiments of the invention permit the user to use the interface to selectively review snippets that pertain to “actions”, “descriptions” or “things”. In the current embodiment, a token that is a verb is identified to be in the “action” category, a token that is a noun is identified to be in the “things” category, and a token that is an adjective/adverb is identified to be in the “descriptions” category. A part-of-speech tag is assigned to the token based upon this part-of-speech determination. 
         [0049]    At  504 , lexical stems are assigned to the appropriate part-of-speech tag, where morphological root forms are properly identified and used to assign the lexical stems. For example, the terms “run”, “ran”, and “running” can all be collected together to a common lexical stem. 
         [0050]    At  506 , the token is added to the appropriate categorization “bucket”. In some embodiments, three hash tables are maintained that correspond to the (a) noun, (b) verb; and (c) adjective/adverb categorizes. The token is added to the appropriate hash table based on the part-of-speech tag assigned to the token, where the lexical stem is used as the key. 
         [0051]    Once the tokens have been properly categorized, the data is processed for display to the user (step  212 ).  FIG. 6  shows a flowchart of an approach to process the data for display. At  602 , the hash tables are sorted. Any suitable sorting methodology can be employed as desired to implement display preferences. For example, the hash tables can be sorted by frequency of occurrence (e.g., descending) of each stem variant. 
         [0052]    At  604 , the UI (user interface) waits for the user to provide input regarding data to be displayed. For example, the user may select any of the “everything”, “actions”, “descriptions”, or “things” buttons on the user interface. The request from the UI may be implemented as a request for results for a term session, where the request is made using the session ID. 
         [0053]    At  606 , the analysis data for the selected results are returned to the user interface. In some embodiments, a JSON (javascript object notation) structure is returned that contains the information from any or all of the three hash tables. Thereafter, at  608 , the data is displayed to the user in the user interface. 
         [0054]    As noted above, the way that the terms are displayed in the user interface correlates to a relative ordering of the terms. For example, the terms corresponding to a relatively higher frequency number will have a relatively higher font size and/or darker display color/shading, whereas the terms corresponding to a relatively lower frequency number will have a relatively smaller font size and/or lighter display color/shading. The font sizes/coloring can be configured to have set ranges for display in a particular font/coloring. Alternatively, the font size can be in a range that is calculated using the relative positioning of the term&#39;s frequency within the overall range of the frequencies. For example, the term larger having the highest frequency can be displayed with the largest font and darkest shade/color, while the term having the smallest frequency is displayed with the smallest font and lightest shade/color. For terms having frequency numbers that are in the range between the max/min frequencies, the font size and shade are proportionally set to their relative positioning in that range. 
         [0055]    As described above, the term analyzer can comprise one or more language engines which provide the services to perform term analysis for a respective language. For each of the different languages, the operations of term analyzer described above can be performed that is specific to the language of interest. For example, the language-specific tokenizers are configured to include a database of information/terms that is specific to the particular language of the language engine. The mechanisms to assign part-of-speech tags and lexical stems operate according to the rules, grammar, constructs, and words of the specific language to which a language engine is directed. 
         [0056]      FIGS. 7-11  are examples of user interfaces that can be used to display and control the term analysis to the user.  FIG. 7  illustrates an example interface for viewing the results of performing analysis upon data from social media sites for a given topic. Semantic analysis is performed that includes theme analysis with respect to the topic of interest, e.g., using latent semantic analysis. The results of the semantic analysis are visually provided in the user interface in  FIG. 7 , which includes a dashboard  700  containing different interface portions for visually displaying the sentiment analysis results for a topic of interest (e.g., the “Obama” topic). Within the interface portion  702 , results are displayed that indicate the percentage/number of the analyzed content that expresses a positive sentiment ( 704 ), neutral sentiment ( 706 ), or negative sentiment ( 708 ). Other interface portions may also be provided, e.g., to provide a chart that tracks activity over time, content types, or a share of voice. 
         [0057]    The user can drill down into selected ones of the content in the interface to perform term analysis. For example,  FIG. 8  shows an example interface for when the user drills down further into the set of content, such as the content that underlies the “positive” sentiment for the topic of interest or at a specific location on the activity chart. Here, the figure shows an interface  800  that displays the results of performing this term analysis. Interface  800  can be configured to include several distinct interface portions. Interface portion  804  contains a listing of the top n terms that appear within the set of content that tracks to the “positive” sentiment. Each of the terms may be visualized or highlighted in a way to provide further information about that term. For example, the size of the font for the displayed term can be selected to indicate the relative frequency of that term within the content (e.g., where a larger font size indicates greater frequency for the term). In addition, having the mouse hover over a given term can be used to control a further display of information for the term (e.g., by having a ghosted window display the exact number of times that the term appears within the content). 
         [0058]    Interface portion  806  displays some or all of the underlying content that corresponds to one of the terms displayed in portion  804 . When one of the terms is selected, portion  806  displays the underlying content, which the user can scroll through to review the exact wording that gives rise to the sentiment analysis. In some embodiments, the displayed content comprises a “snippet”, which may not be the entirety of the content. Instead, the snippet may only contain a given number of words on either side of the occurrence of the word/topic of interest within the content. For example, if the topic of interest is “Obama”, then snippets can be created that extend 200 words in either direction from any suitable occurrence of the word “Obama” within the underlying content. The snippets in interface portion  806  may be displayed in any desired order, e.g., ordered by time, date, size, content significance, etc. 
         [0059]    Interface portion  802  identifies and controls the “type” of the terms that are identified within the content, e.g., action-type terms, description-type terms, or things-related terms. In the present embodiment, one selectable option is to display all of the terms that are identified for the term analysis (e.g., “everything” option). Another option is to only select one of these types for display. 
         [0060]      FIG. 9  illustrates an interface  900  that only displays action-related terms. Each of the terms may be visualized or highlighted in a way to provide further information about that term. For example, the size of the font for the displayed terms (e.g., “make” and “meet”) can be emphasized to indicate the higher relative frequency of that term within the content (e.g., where a larger font size indicates greater frequency for the term). Moreover, a given term can be selected to control a further display of information for the term (e.g., by having a ghosted window display the exact number of times that the term appears within the content). 
         [0061]      FIG. 10  illustrates an interface  1000  that only displays description-related terms.  FIG. 11  illustrates an interface  1100  that only displays things-related terms. As described above, each of the terms may be visualized or highlighted in a way to provide further information about that term. For example, the size of the font for the displayed terms (e.g., “more” and “most” in  FIG. 10  and “Obama” in  FIG. 11 ) can be emphasized to indicate the higher relative frequency of that term within the content, where a larger font size indicates greater frequency for the term. Terms can also be selected to control a further display of information for the term. 
         [0062]    As previously noted, the term analysis can be performed in multiple languages.  FIG. 12  shows an example interface  1200  for selecting a specific language for analysis for a given topic. A menu  1202  is provided to select a topic in one or more languages. This is implemented, for example, by using a term analyzer that comprises one or more language engines, each of which provides the services to perform term analysis for a respective language. 
         [0063]      FIG. 13  shows an example dashboard  1300  for the analysis in the selected language. Portion  1310  provides information about activity levels for the topic in the selected language. Portion  1312  identifies the content types in the analysis, e.g., news, blogs, message boards, microblogs, social sites, consumer reviews, and/or videos. Portion  1314  provides information about the share of voices for the topic of interest. Portion  1316  displays sentiment analysis results for the topic of interest. 
         [0064]      FIG. 14   a - d  show example interfaces for displaying term analysis results based on a selected language. These figures are similar to ones previously described above, with the difference pertaining to the language used for the analysis and the language of the content that is analyzed/displayed in the set of results. These figures provide different views of the interface when analyzing content using a language engine for the French language content, where the different interfaces correspond to the different “type” of the terms that are identified within the content.  FIG. 14   a  shows an interface  1401  where a selectable option is provided to display all of the terms that are identified for the term analysis (e.g., “everything” option) for the language option.  FIG. 14   b  shows an interface  1403  that only displays action-related terms for the language option.  FIG. 14   c  shows an interface  1405  that only displays description-related terms for the language option.  FIG. 14   d  shows an interface  1407  that only displays things-related terms for the language option. 
         [0065]    Therefore, what has been described is an improved system, method, and computer program product for performing term analysis of data, e.g., content from social media data. Semantic analysis can be performed on content from social media sites, where the results are displayed in a dashboard interface. To provide greater understanding and context for the semantic analysis results, the term analysis allows one to visually see and understand the frequency and distribution of terms that appear in the underlying data. This provides many advantages, e.g., by allowing an enterprise or business to more effectively market to the consumers based upon this knowledge of the consumers&#39; interests, concerns, and thoughts. 
       System Architecture Overview 
       [0066]      FIG. 15  is a block diagram of an illustrative computing system  1400  suitable for implementing an embodiment of the present invention. Computer system  1400  includes a bus  1406  or other communication mechanism for communicating information, which interconnects subsystems and devices, such as processor  1407 , system memory  1408  (e.g., RAM), static storage device  1409  (e.g., ROM), disk drive  1410  (e.g., magnetic or optical), communication interface  1414  (e.g., modem or Ethernet card), display  1411  (e.g., CRT or LCD), input device  1412  (e.g., keyboard), and cursor control. 
         [0067]    According to one embodiment of the invention, computer system  1400  performs specific operations by processor  1407  executing one or more sequences of one or more instructions contained in system memory  1408 . Such instructions may be read into system memory  1408  from another computer readable/usable medium, such as static storage device  1409  or disk drive  1410 . In alternative embodiments, hard-wired circuitry may be used in place of or in combination with software instructions to implement the invention. Thus, embodiments of the invention are not limited to any specific combination of hardware circuitry and/or software. In one embodiment, the term “logic” shall mean any combination of software or hardware that is used to implement all or part of the invention. 
         [0068]    The term “computer readable medium” or “computer usable medium” as used herein refers to any tangible medium that participates in providing instructions to processor  1407  for execution. Such a medium may take many forms, including but not limited to, non-volatile media and volatile media. Non-volatile media includes, for example, optical or magnetic disks, such as disk drive  1410 . Volatile media includes dynamic memory, such as system memory  1408 . A data interface  1433  may be provided to interface with medium  1431  having a database  1432  stored therein. 
         [0069]    Common forms of computer readable media includes, for example, floppy disk, flexible disk, hard disk, magnetic tape, any other magnetic medium, CD-ROM, any other optical medium, punch cards, paper tape, any other physical medium with patterns of holes, RAM, PROM, EPROM, FLASH-EPROM, any other memory chip or cartridge, or any other medium from which a computer can read. 
         [0070]    In an embodiment of the invention, execution of the sequences of instructions to practice the invention is performed by a single computer system  1400 . According to other embodiments of the invention, two or more computer systems  1400  coupled by communication link  1415  (e.g., LAN, PTSN, or wireless network) may perform the sequence of instructions required to practice the invention in coordination with one another. 
         [0071]    Computer system  1400  may transmit and receive messages, data, and instructions, including program, i.e., application code, through communication link  1415  and communication interface  1414 . Received program code may be executed by processor  1407  as it is received, and/or stored in disk drive  1410 , or other non-volatile storage for later execution. 
         [0072]    In the foregoing specification, the invention has been described with reference to specific embodiments thereof. It will, however, be evident that various modifications and changes may be made thereto without departing from the broader spirit and scope of the invention. For example, the above-described process flows are described with reference to a particular ordering of process actions. However, the ordering of many of the described process actions may be changed without affecting the scope or operation of the invention. The specification and drawings are, accordingly, to be regarded in an illustrative rather than restrictive sense.