Patent ID: 8332384

Claim:
A method of providing a synopsis of a body of knowledge, comprising: storing within at least one electronic database a representation of a topic hierarchy that comprises a plurality of topics related to the body of knowledge, at least one topic comprising one or more subtopics, and at least one subtopic further comprising one or more subtopics; for each of a plurality of documents, at least one of which is a citing document that includes at least one citation to at least one respective cited document in the plurality of documents other than itself, finding at least one statement within the document that expresses a principle related to the body of knowledge; for each of the principles identified in any one or more of the documents, creating a normalized expression of the principle and storing the created normalized expression within the at least one electronic database in relation to at least one of the subtopics and in relation to each of the documents in which the identified principle was expressed; and for an additional document that is not one of the plurality of documents, finding an additional statement within the additional document that expresses the same principle that one of the previously created normalized expressions expresses and storing the additional document in relation to the previously created normalized expression.