Patent ID: 8014607

Claim:
A system for intelligent node-link diagram creation and editing comprising: an electronic display device having a surface on which a writing and/or drawing canvas is provided; an input device for writing and/or drawing electronic ink strokes; and a computing device, in operative association with the electronic display and the input device, and having stored therein for operation in connection with actions by the input device, a user interface (UI) including, a graphical user interface (GUI) module which controls input and display of the ink strokes applied to the canvas by the input device, and a recognition module which interprets the ink strokes by performance of structure recognition operations, wherein the structure recognition operations are configured to: (i) group related ink strokes to form multiple hypotheses reflecting structured interpretations of the ink strokes, wherein the ink strokes are determined to be related based on similarity characteristics, including but not limited to shape similarity and location proximity; (ii) apply local confidence scores to the multiple hypotheses based on local evidence; (iii) form a lattice of the hypotheses according to their support relations; (iv) apply constraints among the hypotheses; (v) search for hypotheses, under the applied constrains, having collectively high scoring assignments; and (vi) form a subset hypothesis lattices which represents an interpretation of the node-link diagram using hypotheses with collectively high scoring assignments.