Patent ID: 7277879

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for facilitating navigation among concepts in a free-form data object, the method comprising: automatically identifying concepts in a free-form data object, the free-form data object including a plurality of different concepts and each concept having one or more concept instances in the free-form data object, wherein automatically identifying concepts in the free-form data object includes automatically identifying the concept instances corresponding to the concepts; generating a concept-navigable structure for navigating within the free-form data object, the concept-navigable structure associated with the free-form data object and configured to allow navigating among the automatically identified concept instances using the links in the concept-navigable structure, wherein generating the concept-navigable structure further comprises: sorting the concept instances according to position within the free-form data object to form a first sorted list; generating links between sequentially adjacent concept instances in the first sorted list; sorting the concept instances in the first list according to concept to form a second sorted list; and generating links between concept instances that are associated with the same concept in the second sorted list; and embedding the links within the free-form data object to allow navigation among at least one of sequentially adjacent concept instances or concept instances associated with the same concept.