Patent ID: 7340451

Claim:
A process for retrieving information on large heterogeneous databases, wherein information retrieval is performed through visual queries on dynamic taxonomies, said dynamic taxonomies being an organization of concepts that ranges from a most general concept to a most specific concept, said concepts and their generalization or specialization relationships being an intension, documents in said databases being able to be classified under different concepts, said documents and their classification being called an extension, said process comprising: initially displaying a complete taxonomy for said retrieval; selecting subsets of interest of said complete taxonomy in order to refine said retrieval, said subsets of interest being specified by selecting taxonomy concepts and combining taxonomy concepts through boolean operations or being specified through querying methods, which retrieve classified documents according to different selection criteria, including words contained in a document; displaying a reduced taxonomy for said selected set, said reduced taxonomy being derived from the original taxonomy by pruning the concepts under which no document in the selected subset of interest is classified; and iteratively repeating said steps of selecting subsets and of displaying a reduced taxonomy to further refine said retrieval, wherein: said process is performed on documents of any type and format; said intension is organized as a hierarchy of concepts or as a directed acyclic graph of concepts, thereby allowing a concept to have multiple fathers; said process dynamically reconstructs all relationships among concepts based on the classification without requiring, in the intension, concept relationships in addition to generalization or specialization, a relationship between any two concepts existing if and only if at least one document is classified (1) under a first concept or any descendants of the first concept, and (2) under a second concept, or any descendants of the second concept; documents in said classification are classified under a concept at any level in said intension, including concepts with no sons; said taxonomy supports operations for concept insertion, deletion, and modification; said taxonomy supports operations for document insertion and classification, deletion, and reclassification; documents in said classification are classified manually, programmatically, or automatically; said process allows retrieval through different languages on a same database, while maintaining the same classification for all said languages; and said step of displaying a reduced taxonomy either reports only the concepts belonging to the reduced taxonomy or, for each such concept, also reports how many documents in the interest set are classified under the concept.