Patent ID: 8271539

Claim:
A method, comprising: selectively pruning nodes from a hierarchy of nodes using a computing device, the hierarchy of nodes representing items classified into hierarchical categories of information, each node being at least one of (a) associated with at least one item categorized into one of the hierarchical categories of information and included in a set of items and (b) associated with one of the hierarchical categories of information into which items are categorized, the pruning including: determining whether a present node in the hierarchy of nodes is associated with any of the items in the set of items, and pruning the present node to remove the category of information associated with the present node from the hierarchy of nodes, when the present node is not associated with any of the items in the set of items and one of: (a) the present node is determined to have no child nodes, and (b) the present node is determined to have only one child node and the child node is associated with one of the hierarchical categories of information.