Patent ID: 7822773

Claim:
A method for reducing a tree structure in a processing system comprising; providing a plurality of nodes in a tree structure, wherein the plurality of nodes comprise parent nodes and children nodes; querying each of the plurality of nodes based upon a threshold value, wherein the threshold comprises a value used to determine the relevance of each of the plurality of nodes, wherein threshold value comprises an aggregate count value of the records in a particular parent node and the records in the children nodes of the particular parent node; when a count of a particular node matches the threshold then a next child node is queried to determine if the next child node matches the threshold, wherein the count for the particular node comprises the number of records in a directory that satisfy a particular rule, when a child node does not exist for the queried next child node then the next child node is displayed; determining when the particular node has an additional next child, responsive to the particular node having an additional next child, determining when an additional count of the additional next child matches the threshold; visiting all parent nodes based on the querying step until all of the plurality of nodes have been queried; and displaying the nodes that satisfy the threshold value, wherein each of the displayed nodes is a directory that is activated to determine the nodes therewithin.