Patent Document ID: 7730013
Application ID: 11259664

Base Claim:
1. A method of indexing every date occurrence in a plurality of crawled webpage documents, each crawled webpage document containing free-form text, the method comprising the steps of: creating a secure internet connection for a user to monitor the crawled webpage documents; removing html tags from crawled html content of one of the crawled webpage documents; identifying a date occurrence within a selected document from the plurality of crawled webpage documents without reference to information external to the free-form text comprising the selected document and without reference to contextual information within the free-form text, said date occurrence occurring in one or more formats selected from a group of alphanumerical and numerical data formats, wherein said alphanumerical format includes at least one alphabetic representation and said numerical format includes a string of numerical values; reconstructing a span and location of the occurrence of the date after removal of html tags from the crawled html content of the document; disambiguating the date occurrence to provide a disambiguated date comprising a first date for the date occurrence and a second date for every ambiguous interpretation of the date occurrence that cannot be resolved as the first date, said disambiguating comprising at least one of: gathering date format information from one or more pages of a web site and using gathered date format information to resolve the date occurrence; checking ranges of portions of said date occurrence to identify a format of said date occurrence; recognizing overlapping dates by matching formats for the date occurrence; resolving superscripted dates for the date occurrence; utilizing related information contained on a same page or different pages in said selected document to extrapolate a format of said date occurrence; utilizing a recency criterion with regard to similar date occurrences in said document to identify a format of said date occurrence; and gathering a plurality of data format information among a plurality of documents to determine a date-occurrence format; generating a plurality of canonicalized formats for each disambiguated date; packaging the plurality of canonicalized formats corresponding to each disambiguated date as a package that indexes the date occurrence; indexing the ambiguated date occurrences that are not resolved, matching the ambiguated date occurrences to possible interpretations; and storing the package in a database; wherein every data occurrence within every crawled webpage document corresponds to a unique package in the database.

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Claim 5:
5. The method of claim 1 wherein the canonicalized format is selected from a group consisting of a canonical format to support specific date querying, a canonical format to support hierarchical querying, a canonical format to support range date querying, and a canonical format to support proximity date querying, wherein hierarchical date querying comprises querying for documents with a month, a month and year, or a year.