Patent Document ID: 8583628
Application ID: 11615629

Base Claim:
1. A method for retrieving information from a database of manual and learned relationally linked documents, the method comprising: receiving, by a computer system, search parameters from a user; locating, by the computer system, an entry point document responsive to said search parameters, the entry point document comprising a root document in a hierarchy of a plurality of related documents; returning, by the computer system, a search result including said entry point document and one or more manual relational links and one or more learned relational links between said entry point document and one or more related documents in the plurality of related documents, wherein the manual relational links comprise relational links between documents within the hierarchy manually encoded in the documents and wherein the learned relational links comprise dynamic links between documents within the hierarchy that are not manually encoded in the documents, that are not known at a time of creation of the documents, and that are generated automatically based on text of the documents; initiating, by the computer system, one of said learned relational links in response to at least one user link selection; returning, by the computer system, the document from the plurality of related documents that corresponds to said learned initiated relational link; updating, by the computer system, a connection strength rating to said learned initiated relational link based on the user link selection and indicating navigation of the user through the hierarchy; associating, by the computer system, said learned initiated relational link with said search parameters; storing, by the computer system, in said database said learned relationally linked documents, said updated connection strength and said learned initiated relational link with said parameters; returning, by the computer system, additional documents from the plurality of related documents; and recursively associating initiated relational links with said search parameters, wherein at least one of said returning steps include using a clustering algorithm on the hierarchy of the plurality of related documents.

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Claim 3:
3. The method according to claim 1 wherein a connection strength rating is assigned to each of said initiated relational links.