Patent Document ID: 9489625
Application ID: 13891864

Base Claim:
1. A method for creating a virtual personal assistant (“VPA”) computer application for a domain of interest, the method comprising, with a computing system: determining the domain of interest; accessing a computerized ontology defining a structure for representing knowledge relating to a plurality of domains including the domain of interest, each domain referring to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA computer application may conduct a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user, the ontology having linked thereto a plurality of re-usable VPA components, each of the re-usable VPA components being accessible by an executable VPA engine to, during operation of the VPA, determine a likely intended goal of the computing device user based on a determined meaning of explicit and implicit conversational natural language input of the computing device user, execute a task on behalf of the computing device user, and/or generate a likely appropriate system output in response to the conversational natural language input; determining a data relationship between the domain of interest and at least a portion of the ontology; and suggesting a re-usable VPA component to use to create the VPA computer application for the domain of interest based on the data relationship between the domain of interest and the ontology.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the ontology comprises an hierarchical structure of ontological concepts each representing a portion of the knowledge relating to the plurality of domains, the re-usable VPA component is linked with one of the ontological concepts in the hierarchical structure, the data relationship between the domain of interest and the ontology comprises a data relationship between the domain of interest and another of the ontological concepts in the hierarchical structure, and the method comprises identifying the re-usable VPA component in an automated fashion based on an inheritance relationship between the one of the ontological concepts and the other of the ontological concepts in the hierarchical structure.