Patent ID: 7907141

Claim:
A method of providing structure recognition to a node-link diagram formed by a plurality of digital ink strokes drawn on a canvas of an electronic device by an input device, the method comprising: grouping related digital ink strokes into multiple hypotheses reflecting structured interpretation of the digital ink strokes in a group, wherein: structured interpretation of ink strokes comprises determining related ink strokes based on similarity of characteristics of the ink strokes; a hypothesis represents an interpretation of the digital ink stroke groups as a specific object type; computing confidence scores for the multiple hypotheses, each hypothesis having an intrinsic score and a support-context score, wherein: the intrinsic score is based on similarity between digital ink strokes of the digital ink stroke group and defined criteria for the specific object type interpretation represented by the hypothesis; the support-context score is based on the confidence score of surrounding digital ink strokes; applying constraints among the hypotheses; searching hypotheses under the applied constraints for a collectively high scoring assignment; and accepting the hypothesis with the collectively high scoring assignment as a representation of the node-link diagram, wherein structure information is provided to the digital ink strokes of the node-link diagram, making the node-link diagram electronically editable.