Patent ID: 7827188

Claim:
A method for converting a universal resource locator that specifies a location for a publication into a standard publication identifier that identifies the publication, the method comprising: (a) creating a plurality of parser rules, each parser rule being adapted to extract data fields for a particular form of universal resource locator; (b) creating a plurality of translation rules, each translation rule having one or more data fields as inputs and a standard publication identifier as an output; (c) selecting one of the parser rules based on a domain in the universal resource locator and parsing the universal resource locator with the selected rule to generate data field values; (d) applying the data field values generated in step (c) as inputs to the plurality of translation rules and, when the generated data field values match the inputs of a translation rule, using the output of that translation rule as the standard publication identifier; and (e) when the generated data field values do not match the inputs of any of the plurality of translation rules, performing exception processing to determine the standard publication identifier.