Patent ID: 7152054

Claim:
A help architecture in support of an application and a help engine operating on a computer, the help engine for locating help topics relevant to the application, the help architecture comprising: a plurality of help libraries, each help library storing a plurality of help topics therein, the help topics being accessible to a user from the help libraries by way of the computer; and a central store storing a plurality of pieces of topic metadata, each piece of topic metadata corresponding to one of the help topics accessible from the help libraries, the central store in response to a search request from the help engine locating topic metadata relevant to the search request and returning information from the located topic metadata, the search request including search keywords, each piece of topic metadata in the central store including a set of keywords by which the help topic can be searched for and a set of attributes by which the help topic can be filtered, and the central store returning to the requesting help engine information from located pieces of topic metadata containing the search keywords, the returned information corresponding to each located piece of topic metadata and including a summary of the corresponding help topic, a set of attributes relating to the corresponding help topic, and an address by which the corresponding help topic may be located in the corresponding help library, whereby the help engine filters each located piece of topic metadata based on the set of attributes thereof and displays information relating to each filtered piece of topic metadata to the user, the displayed information for each piece of topic metadata including the summary of the corresponding help topic and the address by which the corresponding help topic may be located in the corresponding help library, and whereby the user may review the displayed summary of each help topic and if desired based thereon access the corresponding help topic from the corresponding help library based on the corresponding address.