Patent ID: 7818342

Claim:
A computer program product tangibly embodied in a machine readable storage device, the computer program product including instructions that, when executed, perform operations for tracking data elements that are used in electronic documents, the operations comprising: (i) monitoring a plurality of electronic documents that include one or more data elements, wherein the one or more data elements comprise metadata tags that identify a type of information associated with the metadata tags; (ii) identifying whether an instance of a data element comprising a metadata tag is present in a first electronic document of the plurality of monitored electronic documents; (iii) incrementing a counter value that reflects a number of times the data element is used during a time interval based on the identification of whether the data element comprising the metadata tag is present in the first electronic document, the counter value incremented once for the first electronic document regardless of how many times the data element is present in the first electronic document and regardless of how many times the first electronic document including the data element is accessed; (iv) resetting the counter value at an end of the time interval and thereafter incrementing the reset counter value during a subsequent time interval based on the use of the data element during the subsequent time interval, in accordance with step (iii); (v) periodically retrieving the counter value that reflects the number of times the data element is used during a time interval; (vi) applying a calculation process to the information to determine a usage trend, and identifying a usage trend interface element based on the usage trend, for the data element that comprises the metadata tag; (vii) using the usage trend to map the data element in a second electronic document to a data element in an intermediate document; and (viii) providing a visual display on a display device that shows an identifier for the data element and the usage trend interface element, wherein the visual display of the usage trend interface element replaces a display of an earlier usage trend interface element for the data element corresponding to a previous time interval.