Patent ID: 6996572

Claim:
A method for eliciting information, useful to a user, from first and second collections of entities or resources with explicit and/or implicit, static and/or dynamic relations therebetween, the method comprising the acts of: obtaining the first collection of entities and the second collection of entities, hyperlinks being established between at least some of the entities; obtaining affinity values, including, for each given one of the entities, a respective affinity value for the given entity and each respective one of the other entities of the collection, whereby at least one affinity value depends at least in part on at least one hyperlink; initializing significance values for each of the entities; iteratively calculating updated significance values for each entity, based on the affinities and on the significance values prior to the iterative update, until a predetermined condition is reached; and obtaining the useful information based on the significance values after the final iteration of the act of iteratively calculating.