Patent ID: 7373597

Claim:
A method of converting an electronic document into hypertext, comprising: parsing said electronic document to identify a plurality of variables, recommendations, and logical relationships therebetween; formulating a rule for each said variable from said logical relationships and said recommendations; associating one or more corresponding tags with each said variable, relation, and condition of said logical relationships as they appear in the conditional expression text of the electronic document and each said recommendation text of the electronic document, using said rule to form a nested structure of variable, relation, condition and recommendation tags; inserting into said electronic document, in proximity to the corresponding text to delimit said variables, relations, conditional expressions and recommendations, said one or more corresponding tags to form a hypertext document with said nested tag structure; said associating step further including the insertion of statement tags that surround and delimit portions of text that include proximal condition and recommendation tags and thus express the relationship between said conditions and said recommendation; specifying a unique identifier and logical operator in association with selected ones of said condition tags; using the nested structure of said tags to indicate their relationship, thereby taking advantage of the likelihood that related components of natural language prose appears in close proximity; using the context of conditional expressions through said nesting of tags to allow automatic parsing and construction of logical expressions and their association with proximal recommendation content; said associating step further including forming tags that reference the unique identifier of said condition tags for associating elements that do not appear in direct proximity; inserting said reference tags within their associated nested context to provide the mechanism for association with other respective uniquely identified elements; processing said condition tag structure according to any specified logical operators to determine whether said portions of text are true or false and to further determine the relevancy of proximal recommendations; and displaying said hypertext on a user computer, wherein said displaying distinctively presents said variables and recommendations according to each said corresponding tag.