Patent Document ID: 7792826
Application ID: 11754721

Base Claim:
1. A subject ranking management system for providing ranked search results, the subject ranking management system comprising: a computer; a search engine unit to generate a set of search results, using an index corpus, wherein the search results comprise one or more matching subject items, and wherein the matching subject items match a given set of one or more search terms; a subject hierarchy managing unit to determine, using a taxonomy, one or more parent subject items for the one or more matching subject items, wherein the taxonomy includes at least one of topics and subjects, and wherein the index corpus is related to one of the at least one of the topics and the subjects of the taxonomy; a ranking calculation unit to statistically rank relevant subject items including the matching subject items and the parent subject items, wherein the ranking calculation unit comprises a relevance handler to determine a hierarchy score for each of the relevant subject items based on (1) hierarchy relationships between the each of the relevant subject items and other subject items, and (2) a number of references to one of the matching subject items in original data that is being searched; and a result organizing unit to organize the relevant subject items based on the statistical ranking performed by the ranking calculation unit for each relevant subject item, wherein at least one of the search engine unit, subject hierarchy managing unit, the ranking calculation unit, and the result organizing unit are executable by the computer.

---

Claim 11:
11. The subject ranking management system as claimed in claim 1 further comprising a taxonomy managing unit to generate the taxonomy from one or more metadata sources, the taxonomy managing unit having a parent information handler to provide parent information for each subject item in the taxonomy.