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Sommaire du brevet 2662726 

Énoncé de désistement de responsabilité concernant l'information provenant de tiers

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Disponibilité de l'Abrégé et des Revendications

L'apparition de différences dans le texte et l'image des Revendications et de l'Abrégé dépend du moment auquel le document est publié. Les textes des Revendications et de l'Abrégé sont affichés :

  • lorsque la demande peut être examinée par le public;
  • lorsque le brevet est émis (délivrance).
(12) Demande de brevet: (11) CA 2662726
(54) Titre français: INTERACTION UTILISATEUR PERMETTANT A UN FACILITATEUR DE CLIC DE COLLECTER DES FRAIS DE CLIC PUBLICITAIRE
(54) Titre anglais: USER INTERACTION CAUSING CLICK FACILITATOR TO COLLECT AD CLICK-THROUGH FEE
Statut: Morte
Données bibliographiques
(51) Classification internationale des brevets (CIB):
  • G06Q 30/02 (2012.01)
  • G06Q 30/04 (2012.01)
  • G06K 9/00 (2006.01)
(72) Inventeurs :
  • LAPSTUN, PAUL (Australie)
  • SILVERBROOK, KIA (Australie)
  • HOLLINS, MICHAEL (Australie)
(73) Titulaires :
  • SILVERBROOK RESEARCH PTY LTD (Australie)
(71) Demandeurs :
  • SILVERBROOK RESEARCH PTY LTD (Australie)
(74) Agent: OYEN WIGGS GREEN & MUTALA LLP
(74) Co-agent:
(45) Délivré:
(86) Date de dépôt PCT: 2007-05-28
(87) Mise à la disponibilité du public: 2008-04-24
Requête d'examen: 2009-03-06
Licence disponible: S.O.
(25) Langue des documents déposés: Anglais

Traité de coopération en matière de brevets (PCT): Oui
(86) Numéro de la demande PCT: PCT/AU2007/000734
(87) Numéro de publication internationale PCT: WO2008/046128
(85) Entrée nationale: 2009-03-06

(30) Données de priorité de la demande:
Numéro de la demande Pays / territoire Date
60/829,866 Etats-Unis d'Amérique 2006-10-17
11/672,533 Etats-Unis d'Amérique 2007-02-08
60/888,775 Etats-Unis d'Amérique 2007-02-08

Abrégés

Abrégé français

L 'invention concerne un procédé permettant de créditer une proportion de frais de clic publicitaire à un facilitateur d'interaction utilisateur avec un support imprimé, ledit support comprenant des données codées permettant l'interaction utilisateur. Le procédé comprend les étapes suivantes : (a) un utilisateur exécute l'interaction utilisateur avec le support en utilisant un capteur qui lit au moins certaines des données codées, ladite interaction utilisateur permettant l'affichage d'une première ressource sur un écran, le contenu de cette première ressource incluant au moins une annonce publicitaire; et (b) l'utilisateur sélectionne une annonce publicitaire dans la première ressource, afin d'extraire et d'afficher sur l'écran une ressource d'annonceur correspondant à l'annonce publicitaire. L'étape (b) permet de facturer des frais de clic publicitaire à un annonceur associé à l'annonce publicitaire, et de créditer une proportion des frais de clic publicitaire au facilitateur.


Abrégé anglais

A method of causing a proportion of a click-through fee to be credited to a facilitator of a user interaction with a printed substrate, said substrate comprising coded data enabling the user interaction, said method comprising the steps of: (a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing device, said sensing device reading at least some of the coded data, said user interaction causing a first resource to be displayed on a display device wherein a content of said first resource includes at least one advertisement; and (b) the user selecting an advertisement in said first resource, thereby causing an advertiser resource corresponding to said advertisement to be retrieved and displayed on said display device, wherein step (b) causes said click-through fee to be charged to an advertiser associated with the advertisement, and said proportion of said click-through fee to be credited to said facilitator.

Revendications

Note : Les revendications sont présentées dans la langue officielle dans laquelle elles ont été soumises.



100

CLAIMS


1. A method of causing a proportion of a click-through fee to be credited to a
facilitator of a user
interaction with a printed substrate, said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling the
user interaction, said method comprising the steps of:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction, said user interaction causing a first resource to be displayed on
a display device wherein a
content of said first resource includes at least one advertisement; and
(b) the user selecting an advertisement in said first resource, thereby
causing an advertiser resource
corresponding to said advertisement to be retrieved and displayed on said
display device,
wherein step (b) causes said click-through fee to be charged to an advertiser
associated with the
advertisement, and said proportion of said click-through fee to be credited to
said facilitator.


2. The method of claim 1, wherein the facilitator is selected from the group
comprising:
a content provider of said first resource;
an issuer of said sensing device;
an issuer of a relay device that relays the interaction data to a first
computer system;
the user;
a publisher of the printed substrate or the user information;
an author of the printed substrate or the user information;
a rights holder associated with the user information; and
an advertiser associated with a printed advertisement on the printed
substrate.


3. The method of claim 1, wherein the first resource is a blended resource
comprising content
corresponding to the user interaction and the at least one advertisement.


4. The method of claim 1, wherein said at least one advertisement is selected
using a first context
determined from said user interaction.


5. The method of claim 4, wherein said first context is derived from any one
of the group comprising:
a resource description; a subject description; a user description; and an
environment description.


6. The method of claim 4, wherein the first context comprises at least one
context term selected from
the group comprising: a word, a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization,
a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a geographic location, a date, a time of
day, a day of the week, a current
user location, a user home location, a user demographic indicator, a user
preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a user language.


101

7. The method of claim 3, wherein the user interaction identifies a hyperlink
and the blended resource
comprises hyperlinked content.


8. The method of claim 3, wherein the user interaction identifies a search
request and the blended
resource comprises search-results content.


9. The method of claim 3, wherein said content is selected at least partially
using a first context
determined from said user interaction.


10. The method of claim 3, wherein said at least one advertisement is selected
at least partially using
second context derived from said content.


11. The method of claim 1, wherein at least one of the first resource and the
advertiser resource is a
webpage.


12. The method of claim 1, wherein the user interaction causes:
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system;
and
the first computer system to determine a request using the interaction data
and initiate
obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request.


13. The method of claim 12, wherein the request is encoded in a request URI.


14. The method of claim 12, wherein transmission of the interaction data is
via a relay device.


15. The method of claim 12, wherein the user interaction causes the first
computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the first resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the first resource using the
request.


16. The method of claim 15, wherein the first computer system and the second
computer system are the
same computer system.


17. The method of claim 1 or claim 2, wherein the coded data is indicative of
a region identity
associated with the substrate and of a plurality of locations on the
substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;



102

transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) determine a request using the page description
and the interaction data; and (3)
initiate obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request.


18. The method of claim 14, wherein the facilitator is selected from the group
comprising:
an issuer of the relay device;
an issuer of a SIM card in the relay device; and
a carrier that provides network services to the relay device.

Description

Note : Les descriptions sont présentées dans la langue officielle dans laquelle elles ont été soumises.



CA 02662726 2009-03-06
WO 2008/046128 PCT/AU2007/000734
USER INTERACTION CAUSING CLICK FACILITATOR TO COLLECT AD CLICK-THROUGH
FEE
FIELD OF INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to computing systems and, more
particularly, to a method
and system for enabling selection and use of objects in a computer system. It
has been developed primarily to
enable users to receive useful information from a paper-based user interface.

BACKGROUND
The Applicant has previously described a method of enabling users to access
information from a
computer system via a printed substrate e.g. paper. The substrate has coded
data printed thereon, which is
read by an optical sensing device when the user interacts with the substrate
using the sensing device. A
computer receives interaction data from the sensing device and uses this data
to determine what action is
being requested by the user. For example, a user may select a printed
hyperlink using a sensing device and
retrieve a corresponding webpage via a display device or printer.
It would be desirable to enhance the functionality of the above-described
system. Enhanced
functionality would encourage greater use of the system and, hence, generate
increased revenue streams for
system providers.
More particularly, it would be desirable to provide users with useful
information from every
interaction with the substrate, irrespective of whether the user has
interacted with a specific interactive
element (e.g. hyperlink) on the substrate.
It would further be desirable to provide users with greater control over what
type of information
they receive when interacting with a printed substrate.
SUMMARY OF INVENTION
In a first aspect the present invention provides a method of causing a
proportion of a click-through fee to be
credited to a facilitator of a user interaction with a printed substrate, said
substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling the user interaction, said method
comprising the steps of:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction, said user interaction causing a first resource to be displayed on
a display device wherein a
content of said first resource includes at least one advertisement; and
(b) the user selecting an advertisement in said first resource, thereby
causing an advertiser resource
corresponding to said advertisement to be retrieved and displayed on said
display device,
wherein step (b) causes said click-through fee to be charged to an advertiser
associated with the
advertisement, and said proportion of said click-through fee to be credited to
said facilitator.


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2
Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
a content provider of said first resource;
an issuer of said sensing device;
an issuer of a relay device that relays the interaction data to a first
computer system;
the user;
a publisher of the printed substrate or the user information;
an author of the printed substrate or the user information;
a rights holder associated with the user information; and
an advertiser associated with a printed advertisement on the printed
substrate.
Optionally, the first resource is a blended resource comprising content
corresponding to the user interaction
and the at least one advertisement.

Optionally, said at least one advertisement is selected using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.

Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, the first context comprises at least one context term selected
from the group comprising: a word,
a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.
Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, said content is selected at least partially using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.

Optionally, said at least one advertisement is selected at least partially
using second context derived from
said content.

Optionally, at least one of the first resource and the advertiser resource is
a webpage.


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3
Optionally, the user interaction causes:
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system;
and
the first computer system to determine a request using the interaction data
and initiate
obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request.

Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.

Optionally, transmission of the interaction data is via a relay device.
Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the first
resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the first resource using the
request.
Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) determine a request using the page description
and the interaction data; and (3)
initiate obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request.

Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
an issuer of the relay device;
an issuer of a SIM card in the relay device; and
a carrier that provides network services to the relay device.

In a second aspect the present invention provides a system for crediting a
proportion of a click-through fee
from an advertiser to a facilitator of a user interaction with a printed
substrate, said system comprising:
(A) the printed substrate, said substrate comprising user information and
coded data, said coded data
enabling said user interaction;
(B) a sensing device, said sensing device comprising:
(i) an optical sensor for reading at least some of the coded data when a user
operatively positions or
moves the sensing device relative to the substrate while performing said user
interaction;


CA 02662726 2009-03-06
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4
(ii) a processor for generating interaction data using the read coded data,
said interaction data being
indicative of said user interaction; and
(iii) means for communicating the interaction data, thereby causing a first
resource to be displayed
on a display device in response to the user interaction;
(C) the display device, said display device comprising:
(i) means for receiving the first resource, wherein a content of said first
resource includes at least
one advertisement;
(ii) a processor configured for retrieving an advertiser resource
corresponding to said advertisement
in response to the user selecting said advertisement; and
(iii) a display for displaying the first resource and the advertiser resource;
(D) means for charging said click-through fee from an advertiser associated
with the advertisement when the
user selects said advertisement; and
(E) means for crediting said proportion of said click-through fee to said
facilitator of the user interaction.
Optionally, the display device comprises the sensing device.

In a further aspect the present invention provides a system further
comprising:
(F) a first computer system configured for:
(i) receiving the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof;
(ii) determining a request using the interaction data; and
(iii) initiating obtaining or formation of the first resource using the
request.
In a further aspect there is provided a system wherein:
the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with the
substrate and of a
plurality of locations on the substrate;
the processor of the sensing device is configured for generating the
interaction data to be
indicative of the region identity and of at least one position of the sensing
device relative to the
substrate; and
the first computer system is configured for: (1) identifying a page
description
corresponding to the printed substrate using the region identity; (2)
determining a request using the
page description and the interaction data; and (3) initiating obtaining or
formation of the first
resource using the request.

Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.
In a further aspect there is provided a system further comprising:
(G) a relay device comprising a transceiver configured for:
(i) receiving the interaction data from the sensing device; and
(ii) relaying the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system.


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Optionally, the display device comprises the relay device.

In a further aspect there is provided a system further comprising:
5 (H) a second computer system configured for obtaining or forming the first
resource using the request.
Optionally, the first computer system is configured to send the request to the
display device and the display
device is configured to relay the request to the second computer system,
thereby enabling the second
computer system to obtain or form the first resource.
Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
a content provider of said first resource;
an issuer of the sensing device;
an issuer of a relay device that relays the interaction data to a first
computer system;
the user;
a publisher of the printed substrate or the user information;
an author of the printed substrate or the user information;
a rights holder associated with the user information; and
an advertiser associated with a printed advertisement on the printed
substrate.

Optionally, the first resource is a blended resource comprising content
corresponding to the user interaction
and the at least one advertisement.
Optionally, said at least one advertisement is selected using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.

Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, the first context comprises at least one context term selected
from the group comprising: a word,
a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.


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6
Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, said content is selected at least partially using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.

Optionally, said at least one advertisement is selected at least partially
using second context derived from
said content.
Optionally, at least one of the first resource and the advertiser resource is
a webpage.

In a third aspect the present invention provides a method of causing a
proportion of a click-through fee to be
credited to a facilitator of a user interaction with a printed substrate, said
substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling said user interaction via a sensing
device, said sensing device reading at
least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or moved relative to
the substrate during said user
interaction and generating interaction data indicative of said user
interaction, said method comprising, in a
display device, the steps of:
(a) retrieving and displaying a blended resource comprising content
corresponding to the user
interaction with the substrate and to at least one advertisement;
(b) retrieving and displaying an advertiser resource corresponding to said
advertisement in response
to a user selecting said advertisement,
wherein step (b) initiates said click-through fee being charged to an
advertiser associated with the
advertisement, said proportion of said click-through fee being credited to
said facilitator of said user
interaction with the substrate.

Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
a content provider of said blended resource;
an issuer of the sensing device;
an issuer of a relay device that relays the interaction data to a first
computer system;
the user;
a publisher of the printed substrate or the user information;
an author of the printed substrate or the user information;
a rights holder associated with the user information; and
an advertiser associated with a printed advertisement on the printed
substrate.

Optionally, said at least one advertisement is selected using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.


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7
Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, the first context comprises at least one context term selected
from the group comprising: a word,
a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.
Optionally, said content is selected at least partially using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.

Optionally, said at least one advertisement is selected at least partially
using second context derived from
said content.

Optionally, at least one of the blended resource and the advertiser resource
is a webpage.
Optionally, the user interaction causes:
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system;
and
the first computer system to determine a request using the interaction data
and initiate
obtaining or formation of the blended resource using the request.

Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.

Optionally, transmission of the interaction data is via a relay device.

Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the
blended resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the blended resource using the
request.


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8
Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
the sensing device to transmit the interaction data, or an encoded form
thereof, to a first computer
system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) determine a request using the page description
and the interaction data; and (3)
initiate obtaining or formation of the blended resource using the request.

Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
an issuer of the relay device;
an issuer of a SIM card in the relay device; and
a carrier that provides network services to the relay device.

In a fourth aspect the present invention provides a method of causing a
proportion of a click-through fee to
be credited to a facilitator of a user interaction with a printed substrate,
said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling said user interaction via a sensing
device, said sensing device reading at
least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or moved relative to
the substrate during said user
interaction and generating interaction data indicative of said user
interaction, said method comprising, in a
first computer system, the steps of:
(a) receiving the interaction data or an encoded form thereof;
(b) determining a request using the interaction data; and
(c) using the request to initiate obtaining or formation of a first resource
for display on a display
device, said resource including at least one advertisement,
wherein selection of said advertisement by a user causes an advertiser
resource corresponding to said
advertisement to be displayed on the display device and initiates said click-
through fee being charged to an
advertiser associated with the advertisement, said proportion of said click-
through fee being credited to said
facilitator of said user interaction with the substrate.

Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
a content provider of said first resource;
an issuer of said sensing device;
an issuer of a relay device that relays the interaction data to the first
computer system;
the user;
a publisher of the printed substrate or the user information;
an author of the printed substrate or the user information;


CA 02662726 2009-03-06
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9
a rights holder associated with the user information; and
an advertiser associated with a printed advertisement on the printed
substrate.

Optionally, the first resource is a blended resource comprising content
corresponding to the user interaction
and the at least one advertisement.

In a further aspect the present invention provides a method, further
comprising the step of the first computer
system determining a first context for the user interaction, said at least one
advertisement being selected
using said first context.
Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, the first context comprises at least one context term selected
from the group comprising: a word,
a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.
Optionally, said content is selected at least partially using the first
context.

Optionally, said at least one advertisement is selected at least partially
using second context derived from
said content.
Optionally, the first resource and the advertiser resource are webpages.
Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.

Optionally, the interaction data is received from a relay device communicating
with the sensing device.
Optionally, step (c) comprises:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device.


CA 02662726 2009-03-06
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Optionally, sending the request to the display device causes the display
device to relay the request to a
second computer system, and the second computer system to obtain or form the
first resource using the
request.

5 Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
In a further aspect there is provided a method, wherein:
the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with the
substrate and of a
plurality of locations on the substrate; and
10 the interaction data, received by the first computer system in step (a), is
indicative of the
region identity and at least one position of the sensing device relative to
the substrate.

Optionally, step (b) comprises the sub-steps of:
identifying a page description corresponding to the printed substrate using
the region
identity; and
determining the request using the page description and the interaction data.
Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
an issuer of the relay device;
an issuer of a SIM card in the relay device; and
a carrier that provides network services to the relay device.

In a fifth aspect the present invention provides a method of causing a
proportion of a sales commission fee to
be credited to a facilitator of a user interaction with a printed substrate,
said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling the user interaction, said method
comprising the steps of:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction, said user interaction causing a first resource to be displayed on
a display device wherein a
content of said first resource includes at least one merchant hyperlink; and
(b) the user selecting a merchant hyperlink in said first resource, thereby
causing a merchant
resource corresponding to said merchant hyperlink to be retrieved and
displayed on said display device;
(c) the user making a purchase via said merchant resource,
wherein step (c) causes said sales commission fee to be charged to a merchant
associated with the merchant
resource, and said proportion of said sales commission fee to be credited to
said facilitator.

Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
a content provider of said first resource;
an issuer of said sensing device;
an issuer of a relay device that relays the interaction data to a first
computer system;


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the user;
a publisher of the printed substrate or the user information;
an author of the printed substrate or the user information;
a rights holder associated with the user information; and
an advertiser associated with a printed advertisement on the printed
substrate.

Optionally, the first resource is a blended resource comprising content
corresponding to the user interaction
and the at least one merchant hyperlink.

Optionally, said at least one merchant hyperlink is selected using a first
context determined from said user
interaction.

Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.
Optionally, the first context comprises at least one context term selected
from the group comprising: a word,
a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, said content is selected at least partially using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.
Optionally, said at least one merchant hyperlink is selected at least
partially using second context derived
from said content.

Optionally, at least one of the first resource and the merchant resource is a
webpage.
Optionally, the user interaction causes:
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system;
and
the first computer system to determine a request using the interaction data
and initiate


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obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request.

Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.

Optionally, transmission of the interaction data is via a relay device.

Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the first
resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the first resource using the
request.
Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.

Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) determine a request using the page description
and the interaction data; and (3)
initiate obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request.

Optionally, the facilitator is selected from the group comprising:
an issuer of the relay device;
an issuer of a SIM card in the relay device; and
a carrier that provides network services to the relay device.

In a further aspect the present invention provides a system for crediting a
proportion of a sales commission
fee from a merchant to a facilitator of a user interaction with a printed
substrate, said system comprising:
(A) the printed substrate, said substrate comprising user information and
coded data, said coded data
enabling said user interaction;
(B) a sensing device, said sensing device comprising:
(i) an optical sensor for reading at least some of the coded data when a user
operatively positions or
moves the sensing device relative to the substrate while performing said user
interaction;
(ii) a processor for generating interaction data using the read coded data,
said interaction data being
indicative of said user interaction; and
(iii) means for communicating the interaction data, thereby causing a first
resource to be displayed
on a display device in response to the user interaction;


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(C) the display device, said display device comprising:
(i) means for receiving the first resource, wherein a content of said first
resource includes at least
one merchant hyperlink;
(ii) a processor configured for retrieving a merchant resource corresponding
to said merchant
hyperlink in response to the user selecting said merchant hyperlink; and
(iii) a display for displaying the first resource and the merchant resource;
(D) means for charging said sales commission fee from a merchant associated
with the merchant resource
when the user makes a purchase via said merchant resource; and
(E) means for crediting said proportion of said sales commission fee to said
facilitator of the user interaction.
In a further aspect there is provided a system further comprising:
(F) a first computer system configured for:
(i) receiving the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof;
(ii) determining a request using the interaction data; and
(iii) initiating obtaining or formation of the first resource using the
request.

In a sixth aspect the present invention provides a method of displaying an
advertisement to a user via user
interaction with a printed substrate, said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling the
user interaction, said method comprising:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction; and
(b) said user interaction causing a first resource to be displayed on a
display device, said first
resource being a blended resource comprising at least one advertisement and
content corresponding to said
user interaction,
wherein said at least one advertisement is selected, at least partially, using
a first context of said user
interaction.

Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, the first context comprises at least one context term selected
from the group comprising: a word,
a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.

Optionally, said first context is used to determine ad selection criteria.


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Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, said content is selected, at least partially, using the first
context.

Optionally, the user interaction is within a zone of the substrate having no
advertisements.
Optionally, first resource is a webpage.

Optionally, the user interaction causes:
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system;
and
the first computer system to determine a request using the interaction data
and initiate
obtaining or formation of the blended resource using the request.

Optionally, the first computer system determines the request by:
determining the first context for the user interaction;
determining ad selection criteria using the first context; and
determining the request using the interaction data and the ad selection
criteria.
Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.

Optionally, transmission of the interaction data is via a relay device.

Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the
blended resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the blended resource using the
request.
Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at


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least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
the sensing device to transmit the interaction data, or an encoded form
thereof, to a first computer
system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
5 using the region identity; (2) determine the first context using the page
description and the interaction data;
(3) determine ad selection criteria using the first context; (4) determine a
request using the page description,
the interaction data and the ad selection criteria; and (5) initiate obtaining
or formation of the blended
resource using the request.

10 In a further aspect the present invention provides a system for displaying
an advertisement to a user via user
interaction with a printed substrate, said system comprising:
(A) the printed substrate, said substrate comprising user information and
coded data, said coded data
enabling said user interaction;
(B) a sensing device, said sensing device comprising:
15 (i) an image sensor for reading at least some of the coded data when a user
operatively positions or
moves the sensing device relative to the substrate while performing said user
interaction;
(ii) a processor for generating interaction data using the read coded data,
said interaction data being
indicative of said user interaction; and
(iii) means for communicating the interaction data, thereby causing a first
resource to be displayed
on a display device in response to the user interaction;
(C) a first computer system configured for:
(i) receiving the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof;
(ii) determining first context for the user interaction;
(iii) determining ad selection criteria using the context;
(iv) determining a request using the interaction data and the ad selection
criteria; and
(v) initiating obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request;
(D) the display device, said display device comprising:
(i) means for receiving the first resource, said first resource being a
blended resource comprising at
least one advertisement and content corresponding to said user interaction,
said at least one advertisement
being selected using said ad selection criteria; and
(ii) a display for displaying the first resource.

In a further aspect there is provided a system, further comprising:
(E) a relay device comprising a transceiver configured for:
(i) receiving the interaction data from the sensing device; and
(ii) relaying the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to the first
computer system.
Optionally, the display device comprises at least one of the relay device and
the sensing device.


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In a further aspect there is provided a system, further comprising:
(H) a second computer system configured for obtaining or forming the first
resource using the request.

In a seventh aspect the present invention provides a method of displaying an
advertisement to a user via user
interaction with a printed substrate, said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling the
user interaction, said method comprising:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction; and
(b) said user interaction causing a first resource to be displayed on a
display device, said first
resource being a blended resource comprising at least one advertisement and
content corresponding to said
user interaction,
wherein said at least one advertisement is determined by a zone of said user
interaction.
Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, the first resource is a webpage.
Optionally, the user interaction causes:
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system;
and
the first computer system to determine a request using at least the
interaction data and
initiate obtaining or formation of the blended resource using the request.

Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.

Optionally, the user interaction is within a zone of the substrate having no
printed advertisements.
Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the
blended resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the blended resource using the
request.


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Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
the sensing device to transmit the interaction data, or an encoded form
thereof, to a first computer
system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) determine a zone of said page description using
the interaction data; (3) identify
at least one ad identifier associated with said zone of said page description;
(4) determine a request using the
page description, the interaction data and the at least one ad identifier; and
(5) initiate obtaining or formation
of the blended resource using the request.

In a further aspect the present invention provides a system for displaying an
advertisement to a user via user
interaction with a printed substrate, said system comprising:
(A) the printed substrate, said substrate comprising user information and
coded data, said coded data
enabling said user interaction;
(B) a sensing device, said sensing device comprising:
(i) an image sensor for reading at least some of the coded data when a user
operatively positions or
moves the sensing device relative to the substrate while performing said user
interaction;
(ii) a processor for generating interaction data using the read coded data,
said interaction data being
indicative of said user interaction; and
(iii) means for communicating the interaction data, thereby causing a first
resource to be displayed
on a display device in response to the user interaction;
(C) a first computer system configured for:
(i) receiving the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof;
(ii) determining a zone of said user interaction;
(iii) determining an ad identifier associated with said zone;
(iv) determining a request using the interaction data and the ad identifier;
and
(v) initiating obtaining or formation of the first resource using the request;
(D) the display device, said display device comprising:
(i) means for receiving the first resource, said first resource being a
blended resource comprising at
least one advertisement and content corresponding to said user interaction,
said at least one advertisement
being associated with the zone of said user interaction via said ad
identifier; and
(ii) a display for displaying the first resource.
Optionally, the display device comprises the sensing device.


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In a further aspect there is provided a system, further comprising:
(E) a relay device comprising a transceiver configured for:
(i) receiving the interaction data from the sensing device; and
(ii) relaying the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to the first
computer system.
Optionally, the display device comprises the relay device.

In a further aspect there is provided a system, further comprising:
(F) a second computer system configured for obtaining or forming the first
resource using the request.
Optionally, the first computer system is configured to send the request to the
display device and the display
device is configured to relay the request to the second computer system,
thereby enabling the second
computer system to obtain or form the first resource.

Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, the first resource is a webpage.

In an eighth aspect the present invention provides a method of obtaining a fee
associated with an ad provided
to a user in response to the user interacting with a printed substrate, the
method comprising the steps of:
(a) accepting a bid from an advertiser for provision of the ad when the user
interacts with a predetermined
zone of the printed substrate;
(b) selecting the ad for provision to the user when the user interacts with
the predetermined zone of the
printed substrate;
(c) providing the ad to the user; and
(d) charging a fee to the advertiser after any event selected from the group
comprising:
(i) the ad being provided to the user;
(ii) the user clicking on a hyperlink on the ad; and
(iii) the user completing a purchase via the ad.

Optionally, the ad is selected in accordance with one or more additional
criteria, said additional criteria being
selected from the group comprising: an ad budget, a word, a keyword, a person,
an organization, a place, a
product, a publication, a weather condition, a geographic location, a date, a
time of day, a day of the week, a


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current user location, a user home location, a user demographic indicator, a
user preference, a search history,
a click-through history, a user interest or a user language.

Optionally, the ad is selected in accordance with one or more additional
criteria, said additional criteria being
selected from the group comprising: a resource description; a subject
description; a user description; and an
environment description.

Optionally, a blended resource is provided to the user, said blended resource
comprising the ad and content
corresponding to the user interaction.
Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, the blended resource is a webpage.

Optionally, said printed substrate comprises user information and coded data
enabling the user interaction.
Optionally, a user performs the user interaction with the substrate using a
sensing device, said sensing device
reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or moved
relative to the substrate and
generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction data
being indicative of the user
interaction.
Optionally, said interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, is transmitted
to a first computer system for
interpretation with respect to a page description corresponding to the printed
substrate.

Optionally, the first computer system determines a request using at least the
interaction data and initiates
obtaining or formation of the blended resource using the request.

Optionally, the request comprises at least one ad identifier associated with
said predetermined zone in the
page description.

Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.

Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the
blended resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to a display device;


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the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the blended resource using the
request.
Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.
5
Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
10 the sensing device to transmit the interaction data, or an encoded form
thereof, to the first computer
system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify the page description corresponding
to the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) identify a zone of the user interaction; (3)
determine at least one ad identifier
associated with the zone; (3) determine a request using the page description,
the interaction data and the at
15 least one ad identifier; and (4) initiate obtaining or formation of the
blended resource using the request.
Optionally, the ad is provided to the user on a display device.

In a ninth aspect the present invention provides a method of obtaining a fee
associated with an ad provided to
20 a user in response to the user interacting with a printed substrate, the
method comprising the steps of:
(a) accepting a bid from an advertiser for provision of the ad when the user
interaction invokes a
predetermined concept;
(b) selecting the ad for provision to the user when the user interaction
invokes the predetermined concept;
(c) providing the ad to the user; and
(d) charging a fee to the advertiser after any event selected from the group
comprising:
(i) the ad being provided to the user;
(ii) the user clicking on a hyperlink on the ad; and
(iii) the user completing a purchase via the ad.

Optionally, the ad is selected in accordance with one or more additional
criteria, said additional criteria being
selected from the group comprising: an ad budget, a word, a keyword, a person,
an organization, a place, a
product, a publication, a weather condition, a geographic location, a date, a
time of day, a day of the week, a
current user location, a user home location, a user demographic indicator, a
user preference, a search history,
a click-through history, a user interest or a user language.
Optionally, the predetermined concept is associated with a zone of the printed
substrate.
Optionally, the predetermined concept is invoked from a context of the user
interaction.


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Optionally, said context is derived from any one of the group comprising: a
resource description; a subject
description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, the context comprises at least one context term selected from the
group comprising: a word, a
keyword, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a publication, a
weather condition, a geographic
location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user location, a
user home location, a user
demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-through
history, a user interest or a user
language.

Optionally, the ad is displayed to the user on a display device.

Optionally, a blended resource is provided to the user, said blended resource
comprising the ad and content
corresponding to the user interaction.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.
Optionally, the blended resource is a webpage.

Optionally, said printed substrate comprises user information and coded data
enabling the user interaction.
Optionally, a user performs the user interaction with the substrate using a
sensing device, said sensing device
reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or moved
relative to the substrate and
generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction data
being indicative of the user
interaction.

Optionally, said interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, is transmitted
to a first computer system for
interpretation with respect to a page description corresponding to the printed
substrate.

Optionally, the first computer system determines a request using at least the
interaction data and initiates
obtaining or formation of the blended resource using the request.
Optionally, the request comprises ad selection criteria, said ad selection
criteria comprising at least one
concept determined using said interaction data and said page description.

Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.


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Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the
blended resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to a display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the blended resource using the
request.
Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.

Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
the sensing device to transmit the interaction data, or an encoded form
thereof, to the first computer
system; and
the first computer system to: (1) identify the page description corresponding
to the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) identify at least one concept associated with
the user interaction; (3) determine
a request using the page description, the interaction data and the at least
one concept; and (4) initiate
obtaining or formation of the blended resource using the request.
In a tenth aspect the present invention provides a method of providing search
results to a user via user
interaction with a printed substrate, said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling the
user interaction, said method comprising:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction; and
(b) said user interaction initiating a search and causing a first resource to
be displayed on a display
device, said first resource comprising search-results content,
wherein at least one parameter of said user interaction determines a search
provider for performing said
search.

Optionally, said at least one parameter is a zone of said user interaction on
said printed substrate.

Optionally, one or mores zones of said printed substrate has a predetermined
search provider associated
therewith.

Optionally, said at least one parameter is a publication in which said printed
substrate is contained.


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Optionally, the publication has a predetermined search provider associated
therewith.

Optionally, said at least one parameter is a context of said user interaction.

Optionally, said context is derived from any one of the group comprising: a
resource description; a subject
description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, said context comprises at least one context term selected from the
group comprising: a word, a
keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.

Optionally, said user interaction causes a first computer system to:
generate a query expression comprising one or more search terms for said
search provider;
form a request using the query expression;
determine the at least one parameter of the user interaction;
identify said search provider using the at least one parameter; and
send the request to said search provider.
Optionally, said coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and said user interaction data is indicative of
the region identity and of at least one
position of the sensing device relative to the substrate, said user
interaction causing a first computer system
to:
identify and retrieve at least part of a page description corresponding to the
printed substrate using
the region identity;
generate the query expression using the page description and the at least one
position of the sensing
device.

Optionally, the request is a request URI derived from the query expression.

Optionally, the at least one search term is associated, in the page
description, with a zone of the substrate
containing the position of the sensing device.

Optionally, at least one search term is a keyword extracted from text in the
zone.

Optionally, at least one search term comprises one or more terms selected from
the group comprising
keyword, concept, person, organization, place, product, publication, weather,
geographic location, date, time
of day, day of the week, current location, user home location, user
demographic, user preferences, search


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history, click-through history, user interest and user language.

Optionally, at least one of said search terms is derived from a user
description or an environment description.
Optionally, the query expression is generated by combining the search terms
using operators selected from
the group comprising: Boolean operators proximity constraint operators and
occurrence constraint operators.
Optionally, the at least one search term is a primary search term and at least
one of the other search terms of
the query expression is a context search term, said context search term being
derived from a word, phrase,
line, sentence, paragraph, section, article, document or region containing the
zone.

Optionally, said context search term is contained in or associated with a
word, phrase, line, sentence,
paragraph, section, article, document or region containing the zone.

Optionally, the at least one primary search term is a keyword and the at least
one context search term is
derived by at least partially determining a meaning of said keyword.

Optionally, the meaning is at least partially determined using a method
selected from the group comprising:
identifying a part of speech for said keyword; identifying a supersense of
said keyword; and identifying a
concept corresponding to said keyword in an ontology.

In an eleventh aspect the present invention provides a method of providing a
merchant resource or a
merchant hyperlink to a user via user interaction with a printed substrate,
said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling the user interaction, said method
comprising:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction; and
(b) said user interaction causing the merchant resource or a first resource
comprising the merchant
hyperlink to be displayed on a display device,
wherein at least one parameter of said user interaction determines the
merchant.
Optionally, said at least one parameter is a product indicated by the user
interaction.

Optionally, said at least one parameter is a zone of said user interaction on
said printed substrate.
Optionally, one or mores zones of said printed substrate has a predetermined
merchant associated therewith.
Optionally, said at least one parameter is a publication in which said printed
substrate is contained.


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Optionally, the publication has a predetermined merchant associated therewith.

Optionally, said at least one parameter is a first context of said user
interaction.
5
Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.

Optionally, said first context comprises at least one context term selected
from the group comprising: a word,
10 a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition, a
geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current user
location, a user home location, a
user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a
user language.

15 Optionally, the first resource is a blended resource comprising content
corresponding to the user interaction
and the merchant hyperlink.

Optionally, the user interaction identifies a hyperlink and the blended
resource comprises hyperlinked
content.
Optionally, the user interaction identifies a search request and the blended
resource comprises search-results
content.

Optionally, said content is selected at least partially using a first context
determined from said user
interaction.

Optionally, said merchant hyperlink is selected at least partially using
second context derived from said
content.

Optionally, at least one of the first resource and the merchant resource is a
webpage.
Optionally, the user interaction causes:
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system;
and
the first computer system to determine a request using the interaction data
and initiate
obtaining or formation of the merchant resource or the first resource using
the request.
Optionally, the request is encoded in a request URI.


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Optionally, the user interaction causes the first computer system to initiate
obtaining or formation of the
merchant resource or the first resource by:
the first computer system sending the request to the display device;
the display device relaying the request to a second computer system; and
the second computer system obtaining or forming the merchant resource or the
first resource using
the request.

Optionally, the first computer system and the second computer system are the
same computer system.

Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:
the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;
transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system; and
a first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) determine a request using the page description
and the interaction data; and (3)
initiate obtaining or formation of the merchant resource or the first resource
using the request.

In a twelfth aspect the present invention provides a method of providing a
plurality of options to a user via
user interaction with a printed substrate, said substrate comprising user
information and coded data enabling
the user interaction, said method comprising:
(a) a user performing the user interaction with the substrate using a sensing
device, said sensing
device reading at least some of the coded data when operatively positioned or
moved relative to the substrate
and generating interaction data using the read coded data, said interaction
data being indicative of the user
interaction; and
(b) said user interaction causing a plurality of options to be displayed on a
display device enabling
said user to initiate an action using at least one of said displayed options.

Optionally, said options are at least partially determined by at least one
parameter of the user interaction.
Optionally, said options are at least partially determined by a first context
of said user interaction.
Optionally, said first context is derived from any one of the group
comprising: a resource description; a
subject description; a user description; and an environment description.
Optionally, said first context comprises at least one first context term
selected from the group comprising: a
word, a keyword, a concept, a person, an organization, a place, a product, a
publication, a weather condition,
a geographic location, a date, a time of day, a day of the week, a current
user location, a user home location,
a user demographic indicator, a user preference, a search history, a click-
through history, a user interest or a


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27
user language.

Optionally, said options are at least partially determined by a zone of said
user interaction.

Optionally, a zone of said printed substrate has a predetermined plurality of
options associated therewith.
Optionally, said options are at least partially determined by a gesture of
interaction.

Optionally, the gesture is selected from the group comprising: click, point,
line, swipe, underline and lasso.
Optionally, said options are at least partially determined by a mode of said
sensing device.

Optionally, said plurality of options comprises two or more options selected
from the group comprising:
accessing a brand owner website;
accessing a merchant website;
accessing a favorite merchant's website;
searching for a product online;
searching for a product locally;
calling a directory service;
calling an information service;
calling a brand owner;
calling a merchant;
having a merchant call;
searching the web;
obtaining a definition;
obtaining further information;
creating a bookmark;
copying content to a clipboard;
copying content to a scrapbook;
adding a product to a wish list or shopping cart; and
e-mailing a recipient.

Optionally, said user interaction causes a first resource to be displayed on
said display device, said first
resource comprising the plurality of options.
Optionally, said first resource is a blended resource comprising content
corresponding to the user interaction
and the plurality of options.

Optionally, said options are determined at least partially by second context
derived from said content.


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In a further aspect the present invention provides a method comprising the
further step of:
(c) the user initiating the action by selecting one of said displayed options.
Optionally, the user interaction causes:

transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system; and
the first computer system to determine the plurality of options using the
interaction data; and
the first computer system to return the plurality of options to the display
device.

Optionally, the coded data is indicative of a region identity associated with
the substrate and of a plurality of
locations on the substrate, and the user interaction causes:

the sensing device to generate the interaction data to be indicative of the
region identity and of at
least one position of the sensing device relative to the substrate;

transmission of the interaction data, or an encoded form thereof, to a first
computer system; and
a first computer system to: (1) identify a page description corresponding to
the printed substrate
using the region identity; (2) determine the plurality of options using the
page description and the interaction
data; and (3) return the plurality of options to the display device.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF DRAWINGS
Preferred and other embodiments of the invention will now be described, by way
of non-limiting
example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:
Figure 1 shows an embodiment of basic netpage architecture;
Figure 2 is a schematic of a the relationship between a sample printed netpage
and its online page
description;
Figure 3 shows an embodiment of basic netpage architecture with various
alternatives for the relay device;
Figure 3A illustrates a collection of netpage servers, Web terminals, printers
and relays interconnected via a
network;

Figure 4 is a schematic view of a high-level structure of a printed netpage
and its online page description;
Figure 5A is a plan view showing a structure of a netpage tag;
Figure 5B is a plan view showing a relationship between a set of the tags
shown in Figure 5a and a field of
view of a netpage sensing device in the form of a netpage pen;
Figure 6A is a plan view showing an alternative structure of a netpage tag;
Figure 6B is a plan view showing a relationship between a set of the tags
shown in Figure 6a and a field of
view of a netpage sensing device in the form of a netpage pen;


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Figure 6C is a plan view showing an arrangement of nine of the tags shown in
Figure 6a where targets are
shared between adjacent tags;
Figure 6D is a plan view showing the interleaving and rotation of the symbols
of the four codewords of the
tag shown in Figure 6a;
Figure 7 is a flowchart of a tag image processing and decoding algorithm;
Figure 8 is a perspective view of a netpage pen and its associated tag-sensing
field-of-view cone;
Figure 9 is a perspective exploded view of the netpage pen shown in Figure 8;
Figure 10 is a schematic block diagram of a pen controller for the netpage pen
shown in Figures 8 and 9;
Figure 11 is a schematic view of a pen class diagram;
Figure 12 is a schematic view of a document and page description class
diagram;
Figure 13 is a schematic view of a document and page ownership class diagram;
Figure 14 is a schematic view of a terminal element specialization class
diagram;
Figure 15 is a schematic view of a static element specialization class
diagram;
Figure 16 is a schematic view of a hyperlink element class diagram;
Figure 17 is a schematic view of a hyperlink element specialization class
diagram;
Figure 18 is a schematic view of a hyperlinked group class diagram;
Figure 19 is a schematic view of a form class diagram;
Figure 20 is a schematic view of a digital ink class diagram;
Figure 21 is a schematic view of a field element specialization class diagram;
Figure 22 is a schematic view of a checkbox field class diagram;
Figure 23 is a schematic view of a text field class diagram;
Figure 24 is a schematic view of a signature field class diagram;
Figure 25 is a flowchart of an input processing algorithm;
Figure 25A is a detailed flowchart of one step of the flowchart of Figure 25;
Figure 26 is a schematic view of a hyperlink request class diagram;
Figure 27 is a schematic view of a raw digital ink class diagram.
Figure 28 is a schematic block diagram of a printer controller for the netpage
printer;
Figure 29 is a schematic block diagram of duplexed print engine controllers
and printheads associated with
the printer controller shown in Figure 28;
Figure 30 is a schematic block diagram of the print engine controller shown in
Figures 28 and 29;
Figure 31 is a schematic view of an article group class diagram;
Figure 32 is a schematic view of a selection hyperlink class diagram;
Figure 33 is a schematic view of a selection page server command class
diagram;
Figure 34 is a schematic view of a selection retrieval protocol;
Figure 35 is a schematic view of a styled text object and formatted textflow
fragment class diagram;
Figure 36 is a schematic view of a page fragment bearing some printed text,
with two words of the text
selected by circumscription (lasso);
Figure 37 is a schematic view of a page fragment bearing a set of commands
that operate on the current
selection;


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Figure 38 is a styled paragraph and formatted text line object diagram;
Figure 39 shows an alternative embodiment of netpage archtitecture;
Figure 40 shows a further alternative embodiment of netpage archtitecture;
Figure 41 shows a click gesture to select a word of text;
5 Figure 42 shows a swipe or underlining gesture to select three words of
text;
Figure 43 shows a stroke interpreter object model;
Figure 44 shows a button assignment object model;
Figure 45 shows an example button assignment;
Figure 46 shows gesture based behavior;
10 Figure 47 shows how buttons and gestures can be combined to determine
behavior;
Figure 48 is an example of using a parameterized URI;
Figure 49 shows a <term> markup example;
Figure 50 shows a "Text and Product Search" Stroke Interpreter;
Figure 51 shows how a "Text and Product Search" can be disambiguated via
gestures;
15 Figure 52 shows online linking from printed editorial information;
Figure 53 shows an existing document publishing process;
Figure 54 shows a Phase A-1 document publishing process;
Figure 55 shows a Phase A-2 document publishing process;
Figure 56 shows a Phase A-3 document publishing process;
20 Figure 57 shows a Phase D-1 & D-2 document publishing process;
Figure 58 provides a key to the use case diagrams in Figures 59 to 62;
Figure 59 shows online linking from a printed ad and from product references;
Figure 60 shows alternative online linking from a printed ad and from product
references;
Figure 61 shows online linking from printed editorial information;
25 Figure 62 shows a search from printed content;
Figure 63 shows printed content interaction followed by online click-through
and purchase;
Figure 64 shows printed ad interaction followed by online click-through and
purchase;
Figure 65 shows interactions between entities during printed content
interaction and ad click-through;
Figure 66 shows interactions between entities during paper interaction and
online purchase;
30 Figure 67 is a document class diagram;
Figure 68 is a group element class diagram;
Figure 69 is a zone class diagram;
Figure 70 is a visual element class diagram;
Figure 71 is a field element class diagram;
Figure 72 is a styled text object with inline markup class diagram;
Figure 73 shows some document examples;
Figure 74 is a resource class diagram;
Figure 75 is a resource description class diagram;
Figure 76 is a subject description class diagram;


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Figure 77 is an ontology class diagram;
Figure 78 is a lexicon class diagram;
Figure 79 is a noun concept specialization class diagram;
Figure 80 is a portal specification class diagram;
Figure 81 is a search specification class diagram;
Figure 82 is a further search specification class diagram;
Figure 83 is an environment description class diagram;
Figure 84 is a location class diagram;
Figure 85 is a user description class diagram;
Figure 86 is a query description class diagram;
Figure 87 is an occurrence and proximity constraint class diagram;
Figure 88 shows concordance and semantic concordance class diagrams;
Figure 89 is an advertiser and ad class diagram;
Figure 90 is an entity class diagram;
Figure 91 shows a contextual document search data flow;
Figure 92 shows query processing strategies;
Figure 93 shows a contextual ad placement data flow;
Figure 94 shows region elements for the regions in Figure 95; and
Figure 95 shows a photo with subject descriptions.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PREFERRED AND OTHER EMBODIMENTS
Note: MemjetTM is a trade mark of Silverbrook Research Pty Ltd, Australia.
In the preferred embodiment, the invention is configured to work with the
netpage networked
computer system, a detailed overview of which follows. It will be appreciated
that not every implementation
will necessarily embody all or even most of the specific details and
extensions discussed below in relation to
the basic system. However, the system is described in its most complete form
to reduce the need for external
reference when attempting to understand the context in which the preferred
embodiments and aspects of the
present invention operate.
In brief summary, the preferred form of the netpage system employs a computer
interface in the
form of a mapped surface, that is, a physical surface which contains
references to a map of the surface
maintained in a computer system. The map references can be queried by an
appropriate sensing device.
Depending upon the specific implementation, the map references may be encoded
visibly or invisibly, and
defined in such a way that a local query on the mapped surface yields an
unambiguous map reference both
within the map and among different maps. The computer system can contain
information about features on
the mapped surface, and such information can be retrieved based on map
references supplied by a sensing
device used with the mapped surface. The information thus retrieved can take
the form of actions which are
initiated by the computer system on behalf of the operator in response to the
operator's interaction with the
surface features.
In its preferred form, the netpage system relies on the production of, and
human interaction with,


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32
netpages. These are pages of text, graphics and images printed on ordinary
paper, but which work like
interactive webpages. Information is encoded on each page using ink which is
substantially invisible to the
unaided human eye. The ink, however, and thereby the coded data, can be sensed
by an optically imaging
sensing device and transmitted to the netpage system. The sensing device may
take the form of a clicker (for
clicking on a specific position on a surface), a pointer having a stylus (for
pointing or gesturing on a surface
using pointer strokes), or a pen having a marking nib (for marking a surface
with ink when pointing,
gesturing or writing on the surface).
In one embodiment, active buttons and hyperlinks on each page can be clicked
with the sensing
device to request information from the network or to signal preferences to a
network server. In one
embodiment, text written by hand on a netpage is automatically recognized and
converted to computer text in
the netpage system, allowing forms to be filled in. In other embodiments,
signatures recorded on a netpage
are automatically verified, allowing e-commerce transactions to be securely
authorized. In other
embodiments, text on a netpage may be clicked or gestured to initiate a search
based on keywords indicated
by the user.
As illustrated in Figure 2, a printed netpage 1 can represent a interactive
form which can be filled
in by the user both physically, on the printed page, and "electronically", via
communication between the pen
and the netpage system. The example shows a"Request" form containing name and
address fields and a
submit button. The netpage consists of graphic data 2 printed using visible
ink, and coded data 3 printed as a
collection of tags 4 using invisible ink. The corresponding page description
5, stored on the netpage network,
describes the individual elements of the netpage. In particular it describes
the type and spatial extent (zone)
of each interactive element (i.e. text field or button in the example), to
allow the netpage system to correctly
interpret input via the netpage. The submit button 6, for example, has a zone
7 which corresponds to the
spatial extent of the corresponding graphic 8.
As illustrated in Figures 1 and 3, netpage sensing device 101, such as the pen
shown in Figures 8
and 9 and described in more detail below, works in conjunction with a netpage
relay device 601, which is an
Internet-connected device for home, office or mobile use. The pen is wireless
and communicates securely
with the netpage relay device 601 via a short-range radio link 9. In an
alternative embodiment, the netpage
pen 101 utilises a wired connection, such as a USB or other serial connection,
to the relay device 601.

The relay device 601 performs the basic function of relaying interaction data
to a page server 10,
which interprets the interaction data. As shown in Figure 3, the relay device
601 may, for example, take the
form of a personal computer 601 a, a netpage printer 601b or some other relay
601 c.
The netpage printer 601b is able to deliver, periodically or on demand,
personalized newspapers,
magazines, catalogs, brochures and other publications, all printed at high
quality as interactive netpages.
Unlike a personal computer, the netpage printer is an appliance which can be,
for example, wall-mounted
adjacent to an area where the morning news is first consumed, such as in a
user's kitchen, near a breakfast
table, or near the household's point of departure for the day. It also comes
in tabletop, desktop, portable and
miniature versions. Netpages printed on-demand at their point of consumption
combine the ease-of-use of
paper with the timeliness and interactivity of an interactive medium.
Alternatively, the netpage relay device 601 may be a portable device, such as
a mobile phone or


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PDA, a laptop or desktop computer, or an information appliance connected to a
shared display, such as a TV.
If the relay device 601 is not a netpage printer 601b which prints netpages
digitally and on demand, the
netpages may be printed by traditional analog printing presses, using such
techniques as offset lithography,
flexography, screen printing, relief printing and rotogravure, as well as by
digital printing presses, using
techniques such as drop-on-demand inkjet, continuous inkjet, dye transfer, and
laser printing.
As shown in Figure 3, the netpage sensing device 101 interacts with the coded
data on a printed
netpage 1, or other printed substate such as a label of a product item 251,
and communicates, via a short-
range radio link 9, the interaction to the relay 601. The relay 601 sends
corresponding interaction data to the
relevant netpage page server 10 for interpretation. Raw data received from the
sensing device 101 may be
relayed directly to the page server 10 as interaction data. Alternatively, the
interaction data may be encoded
in the form of an interaction URI and transmitted to the page server 10 via a
user's web browser. Of course,
the relay device 601 (e.g. mobile phone) may incorporate a web browser and a
user display.
In appropriate circumstances, the page server sends a corresponding message to
application
computer software running on a netpage application server 13. The application
server may in turn send a
response which is displayed on a user display device associated with the relay
601, or printed on the
originating netpage printer.
The netpage relay device 601 can be configured to support any number of
sensing devices, and a
sensing device can work with any number of netpage relays. In the preferred
implementation, each netpage
sensing device 101 has a unique identifier. This allows each user to maintain
a distinct profile with respect to
a netpage page server 10 or application server 13.
Digital, on-demand delivery of netpages 1 may be performed by the netpage
printer 601b, which
exploits the growing availability of broadband Internet access. Netpage
publication servers 14 on the
netpage network are configured to deliver print-quality publications to
netpage printers. Periodical
publications are delivered automatically to subscribing netpage printers via
pointcasting and multicasting
Internet protocols. Personalized publications are filtered and formatted
according to individual user profiles.
A netpage pen may be registered with a netpage registration server 11 and
linked to one or more
payment card accounts. This allows e-commerce payments to be securely
authorized using the netpage pen.
The netpage registration server compares the signature captured by the netpage
pen with a previously
registered signature, allowing it to authenticate the user's identity to an e-
commerce server. Other biometrics
can also be used to verify identity. One version of the netpage pen includes
fingerprint scanning, verified in a
similar way by the netpage registration server.

NETPAGE SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Each object model in the system is described using a Unified Modeling Language
(UML) class
diagram. A class diagram consists of a set of object classes connected by
relationships, and two kinds of
relationships are of interest here: associations and generalizations. An
association represents some kind of
relationship between objects, i.e. between instances of classes. A
generalization relates actual classes, and
can be understood in the following way: if a class is thought of as the set of
all objects of that class, and class
A is a generalization of class B, then B is simply a subset of A. The UML does
not directly support second-


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order modelling - i.e. classes of classes.
Each class is drawn as a rectangle labelled with the name of the class. It
contains a list of the
attributes of the class, separated from the name by a horizontal line, and a
list of the operations of the class,
separated from the attribute list by a horizontal line. In the class diagrams
which follow, however, operations
are never modelled.
An association is drawn as a line joining two classes, optionally labelled at
either end with the
multiplicity of the association. The default multiplicity is one. An asterisk
(*) indicates a multiplicity of
"many", i.e. zero or more. Each association is optionally labelled with its
name, and is also optionally
labelled at either end with the role of the corresponding class. An open
diamond indicates an aggregation
association ("is-part-of'), and is drawn at the aggregator end of the
association line.
A generalization relationship ("is-a") is drawn as a solid line joining two
classes, with an arrow
(in the form of an open triangle) at the generalization end.
When a class diagram is broken up into multiple diagrams, any class which is
duplicated is shown
with a dashed outline in all but the main diagram which defines it. It is
shown with attributes only where it is
defined.
1 NETPAGES
Netpages are the foundation on which a netpage network is built. They provide
a paper-based
user interface to published information and interactive services.
A netpage consists of a printed page (or other surface region) invisibly
tagged with references to
an online description of the page. The online page description is maintained
persistently by the netpage page
server 10. The page description describes the visible layout and content of
the page, including text, graphics
and images. It also describes the input elements on the page, including
buttons, hyperlinks, and input fields.
A netpage allows markings made with a netpage pen on its surface to be
simultaneously captured and
processed by the netpage system.
Multiple netpages (for example, those printed by analog printing presses) can
share the same page
description. However, to allow input through otherwise identical pages to be
distinguished, each netpage
may be assigned a unique page identifier. This page ID has sufficient
precision to distinguish between a very
large number of netpages.
Each reference to the page description is encoded in a printed tag. The tag
identifies the unique
page on which it appears, and thereby indirectly identifies the page
description. The tag also identifies its
own position on the page. Characteristics of the tags are described in more
detail below.
Tags are typically printed in infrared-absorptive ink on any substrate which
is infrared-reflective,
such as ordinary paper, or in infrared fluorescing ink. Near-infrared
wavelengths are invisible to the human
eye but are easily sensed by a solid-state image sensor with an appropriate
filter.
A tag is sensed by an area image sensor in the netpage sensing device, and the
tag data is
transmitted to the netpage system via the nearest netpage relay device. The
pen is wireless and communicates
with the netpage relaye device via a short-range radio link. Tags are
sufficiently small and densely arranged
that the sensing device can reliably image at least one tag even on a single
click on the page. It is important
that the pen recognize the page ID and position on every interaction with the
page, since the interaction is


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stateless. Tags are error-correctably encoded to make them partially tolerant
to surface damage.
The netpage page server 10 maintains a unique page instance for each unique
printed netpage,
allowing it to maintain a distinct set of user-supplied values for input
fields in the page description for each
printed netpage.
5 The relationship between the page description, the page instance, and the
printed netpage is
shown in Figure 4. The printed netpage may be part of a printed netpage
document 45. The page instance
may be associated with both the netpage printer which printed it and, if
known, the netpage user who
requested it.
2 NETPAGE TAGS
10 2.1 Tag Data Content
In a preferred form, each tag identifies the region in which it appears, and
the location of that tag
within the region. A tag may also contain flags which relate to the region as
a whole or to the tag. One or
more flag bits may, for example, signal a tag sensing device to provide
feedback indicative of a function
associated with the immediate area of the tag, without the sensing device
having to refer to a description of
15 the region. A netpage pen may, for example, illuminate an "active area" LED
when in the zone of a
hyperlink.
As will be more clearly explained below, in a preferred embodiment, each tag
contains an easily
recognized invariant structure which aids initial detection, and which assists
in minimizing the effect of any
warp induced by the surface or by the sensing process. The tags preferably
tile the entire page, and are suffi-
20 ciently small and densely arranged that the pen can reliably image at least
one tag even on a single click on
the page. It is important that the pen recognize the page ID and position on
every interaction with the page,
since the interaction is stateless.
In a preferred embodiment, the region to which a tag refers coincides with an
entire page, and the
region ID encoded in the tag is therefore synonymous with the page ID of the
page on which the tag appears.
25 In other embodiments, the region to which a tag refers can be an arbitrary
subregion of a page or other
surface. For example, it can coincide with the zone of an interactive element,
in which case the region ID can
directly identify the interactive element.
Table 1 - Tag data
Field Precision (bits)
Page ID / Region ID 100
Tag ID / x-y coordinates 16
Flags 4
Tota I 120

30 Each tag contains 120 bits of information, typically allocated as shown in
Table 1. Assuming a
maximum tag density of 64 per square inch, a 16-bit tag ID supports a region
size of up to 1024 square
inches. Larger regions can be mapped continuously without increasing the tag
ID precision simply by using
abutting regions and maps. The 100-bit region ID allows 210 (-1030 or a
million trillion trillion) different
regions to be uniquely identified.


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2.2 Tag Data Encoding
The 120 bits of tag data are redundantly encoded using a (15, 5) Reed-Solomon
code. This yields
360 encoded bits consisting of 6 codewords of 15 4-bit symbols each. The (15,
5) code allows up to 5
symbol errors to be corrected per codeword, i.e. it is tolerant of a symbol
error rate of up to 33% per
codeword.
Each 4-bit symbol is represented in a spatially coherent way in the tag, and
the symbols of the six
codewords are interleaved spatially within the tag. This ensures that a burst
error (an error affecting multiple
spatially adjacent bits) damages a minimum number of symbols overall and a
minimum number of symbols
in any one codeword, thus maximising the likelihood that the burst error can
be fully corrected.
Any suitable error-correcting code code can be used in place of a (15, 5) Reed-
Solomon code, for
example a Reed-Solomon code with more or less redundancy, with the same or
different symbol and
codeword sizes; another block code; or a different kind of code, such as a
convolutional code (see, for
example, Stephen B. Wicker, Error Control Systems for Digital Communication
and Storage, Prentice-Hall
1995, the contents of which a herein incorporated by cross-reference).
2.3 Physical Tag Structure
The physical representation of the tag, shown in Figure 5a, includes fixed
target structures 15, 16,
17 and variable data areas 18. The fixed target structures allow a sensing
device such as the netpage pen to
detect the tag and infer its three-dimensional orientation relative to the
sensor. The data areas contain
representations of the individual bits of the encoded tag data.
To achieve proper tag reproduction, the tag is rendered at a resolution of
256x256 dots. When
printed at 1600 dots per inch this yields a tag with a diameter of about 4 mm.
At this resolution the tag is
designed to be surrounded by a "quiet area" of radius 16 dots. Since the quiet
area is also contributed by
adjacent tags, it only adds 16 dots to the effective diameter of the tag.
The tag includes six target structures. A detection ring 15 allows the sensing
device to initially
detect the tag. The ring is easy to detect because it is rotationally
invariant and because a simple correction of
its aspect ratio removes most of the effects of perspective distortion. An
orientation axis 16 allows the
sensing device to determine the approximate planar orientation of the tag due
to the yaw of the sensor. The
orientation axis is skewed to yield a unique orientation. Four perspective
targets 17 allow the sensing device
to infer an accurate two-dimensional perspective transform of the tag and
hence an accurate three-
dimensional position and orientation of the tag relative to the sensor.
All target structures are redundantly large to improve their immunity to
noise.
The overall tag shape is circular. This supports, amongst other things,
optimal tag packing on an
irregular triangular grid. In combination with the circular detection ring,
this makes a circular arrangement of
data bits within the tag optimal. To maximise its size, each data bit is
represented by a radial wedge in the
form of an area bounded by two radial lines and two concentric circular arcs.
Each wedge has a minimum
dimension of 8 dots at 1600 dpi and is designed so that its base (its inner
arc), is at least equal to this
minimum dimension. The height of the wedge in the radial direction is always
equal to the minimum
dimension. Each 4-bit data symbol is represented by an array of 2x2 wedges.
The 15 4-bit data symbols of each of the six codewords are allocated to the
four concentric


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symbol rings 18a to 18d in interleaved fashion. Symbols are allocated
alternately in circular progression
around the tag.
The interleaving is designed to maximise the average spatial distance between
any two symbols
of the same codeword.
In order to support "single-click" interaction with a tagged region via a
sensing device, the
sensing device must be able to see at least one entire tag in its field of
view no matter where in the region or
at what orientation it is positioned. The required diameter of the field of
view of the sensing device is
therefore a function of the size and spacing of the tags.
Assuming a circular tag shape, the minimum diameter of the sensor field of
view is obtained
when the tags are tiled on a equilateral triangular grid, as shown in Figure
5b.
2.4 Tag Image Processing and Decoding
The tag image processing and decoding performed by a sensing device such as
the netpage pen is
shown in Figure 7. While a captured image is being acquired from the image
sensor, the dynamic range of
the image is determined (at 20). The center of the range is then chosen as the
binary threshold for the image
21. The image is then thresholded and segmented into connected pixel regions
(i.e. shapes 23) (at 22).
Shapes which are too small to represent tag target structures are discarded.
The size and centroid of each
shape is also computed.
Binary shape moments 25 are then computed (at 24) for each shape, and these
provide the basis
for subsequently locating target structures. Central shape moments are by
their nature invariant of position,
and can be easily made invariant of scale, aspect ratio and rotation.
The ring target structure 15 is the first to be located (at 26). A ring has
the advantage of being
very well behaved when perspective-distorted. Matching proceeds by aspect-
normalizing and rotation-
normalizing each shape's moments. Once its second-order moments are normalized
the ring is easy to
recognize even if the perspective distortion was significant. The ring's
original aspect and rotation 27
together provide a useful approximation of the perspective transform.
The axis target structure 16 is the next to be located (at 28). Matching
proceeds by applying the
ring's normalizations to each shape's moments, and rotation-normalizing the
resulting moments. Once its
second-order moments are normalized the axis target is easily recognized. Note
that one third order moment
is required to disambiguate the two possible orientations of the axis. The
shape is deliberately skewed to one
side to make this possible. Note also that it is only possible to rotation-
normalize the axis target after it has
had the ring's normalizations applied, since the perspective distortion can
hide the axis target's axis. The axis
target's original rotation provides a useful approximation of the tag's
rotation due to pen yaw 29.
The four perspective target structures 17 are the last to be located (at 30).
Good estimates of their
positions are computed based on their known spatial relationships to the ring
and axis targets, the aspect and
rotation of the ring, and the rotation of the axis. Matching proceeds by
applying the ring's normalizations to
each shape's moments. Once their second-order moments are normalized the
circular perspective targets are
easy to recognize, and the target closest to each estimated position is taken
as a match. The original centroids
of the four perspective targets are then taken to be the perspective-distorted
corners 31 of a square of known
size in tag space, and an eight-degree-of-freedom perspective transform 33 is
inferred (at 32) based on


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38
solving the well-understood equations relating the four tag-space and image-
space point pairs (see Heckbert,
P., Fundamentals of Texture Mapping and Image Warping, Masters Thesis, Dept.
of EECS, U. of California
at Berkeley, Technical Report No. UCB/CSD 89/516, June 1989, the contents of
which are herein
incorporated by cross-reference).
The inferred tag-space to image-space perspective transform is used to project
(at 36) each known
data bit position in tag space into image space where the real-valued position
is used to bilinearly interpolate
(at 36) the four relevant adjacent pixels in the input image. The previously
computed image threshold 21 is
used to threshold the result to produce the final bit value 37.
Once all 360 data bits 37 have been obtained in this way, each of the six 60-
bit Reed-Solomon
codewords is decoded (at 38) to yield 20 decoded bits 39, or 120 decoded bits
in total. Note that the
codeword symbols are sampled in codeword order, so that codewords are
implicitly de-interleaved during the
sampling process.
The ring target 15 is only sought in a subarea of the image whose relationship
to the image
guarantees that the ring, if found, is part of a complete tag. If a complete
tag is not found and successfully
decoded, then no pen position is recorded for the current frame. Given
adequate processing power and
ideally a non-minimal field of view 193, an alternative strategy involves
seeking another tag in the current
image.
The obtained tag data indicates the identity of the region containing the tag
and the position of the
tag within the region. An accurate position 35 of the pen nib in the region,
as well as the overall orientation
35 of the pen, is then inferred (at 34) from the perspective transform 33
observed on the tag and the known
spatial relationship between the pen's physical axis and the pen's optical
axis.
2.5 Alternative Tag Structures
The tag structure described above is designed to support the tagging of non-
planar surfaces where
a regular tiling of tags may not be possible. In the more usual case of planar
surfaces where a regular tiling of
tags is possible, i.e. surfaces such as sheets of paper and the like, more
efficient tag structures can be used
which exploit the regular nature of the tiling.
Figure 6a shows a square tag 4 with four perspective targets 17. It is similar
in structure to tags
described by Bennett et al. in US Patent 5051746. The tag represents sixty 4-
bit Reed-Solomon symbols 47,
for a total of 240 bits. The tag represents each one bit as a dot 48, and each
zero bit by the absence of the
corresponding dot. The perspective targets are designed to be shared between
adjacent tags, as shown in
Figures 6b and 6c. Figure 6b shows a square tiling of 16 tags and the
corresponding minimum field of view
193, which must span the diagonals of two tags. Figure 6c shows a square
tiling of nine tags, containing all
one bits for illustration purposes.
Using a (15, 7) Reed-Solomon code, 112 bits of tag data are redundantly
encoded to produce 240
encoded bits. The four codewords are interleaved spatially within the tag to
maximize resilience to burst
errors. Assuming a 16-bit tag ID as before, this allows a region ID of up to
92 bits.
The data-bearing dots 48 of the tag are designed to not overlap their
neighbors, so that groups of
tags cannot produce structures which resemble targets. This also saves ink.
The perspective targets therefore
allow detection of the tag, so further targets are not required. Tag image
processing proceeds as described in


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section 1.2.4 above, with the exception that steps 26 and 28 are omitted.
Although the tag may contain an orientation feature to allow disambiguation of
the four possible
orientations of the tag relative to the sensor, it is also possible to embed
orientation data in the tag data. For
example, the four codewords can be arranged so that each tag orientation
contains one codeword placed at
that orientation, as shown in Figure 6d, where each symbol is labelled with
the number of its codeword (1-4)
and the position of the symbol within the codeword (A-O). Tag decoding then
consists of decoding one
codeword at each orientation. Each codeword can either contain a single bit
indicating whether it is the first
codeword, or two bits indicating which codeword it is. The latter approach has
the advantage that if, say, the
data content of only one codeword is required, then at most two codewords need
to be decoded to obtain the
desired data. This may be the case if the region ID is not expected to change
within a stroke and is thus only
decoded at the start of a stroke. Within a stroke only the codeword containing
the tag ID is then desired.
Furthermore, since the rotation of the sensing device changes slowly and
predictably within a stroke, only
one codeword typically needs to be decoded per frame.
It is possible to dispense with perspective targets altogether and instead
rely on the data
representation being self-registering. In this case each bit value (or multi-
bit value) is typically represented
by an explicit glyph, i.e. no bit value is represented by the absence of a
glyph. This ensures that the data grid
is well-populated, and thus allows the grid to be reliably identified and its
perspective distortion detected and
subsequently corrected during data sampling. To allow tag boundaries to be
detected, each tag data must
contain a marker pattern, and these must be redundantly encoded to allow
reliable detection. The overhead of
such marker patterns is similar to the overhead of explicit perspective
targets. One such scheme uses dots
positioned a various points relative to grid vertices to represent different
glyphs and hence different multi-bit
values (see Anoto Technology Description, Anoto Apri12000).
Additional tag structures are disclosed in US Patent 6929186 ("Orientation-
indicating machine-
readable coded data") filed by the applicant or assignee of the present
invention.
2.6 Tag Map
Decoding a tag results in a region ID, a tag ID, and a tag-relative pen
transform. Before the tag ID
and the tag-relative pen location can be translated into an absolute location
within the tagged region, the
location of the tag within the region must be known. This is given by a tag
map, a function which maps each
tag ID in a tagged region to a corresponding location. The tag map class
diagram is shown in Figure 22, as
part of the netpage printer class diagram.
A tag map reflects the scheme used to tile the surface region with tags, and
this can vary
according to surface type. When multiple tagged regions share the same tiling
scheme and the same tag
numbering scheme, they can also share the same tag map.
The tag map for a region must be retrievable via the region ID. Thus, given a
region ID, a tag ID
and a pen transform, the tag map can be retrieved, the tag ID can be
translated into an absolute tag location
within the region, and the tag-relative pen location can be added to the tag
location to yield an absolute pen
location within the region.
The tag ID may have a structure which assists translation through the tag map.
It may, for
example, encode cartesian (x-y) coordinates or polar coordinates, depending on
the surface type on which it


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appears. The tag ID structure is dictated by and known to the tag map, and tag
IDs associated with different
tag maps may therefore have different structures.
2.7 Tagging Schemes
The preferred coding scheme uses "location-indicating" tags as already
discussed. An alternative
5 coding scheme uses object-indicating tags.
A location-indicating tag contains a tag ID which, when translated through the
tag map associated
with the tagged region, yields a unique tag location within the region. The
tag-relative location of the pen is
added to this tag location to yield the location of the pen within the region.
This in turn is used to determine
the location of the pen relative to a user interface element in the page
description associated with the region.
10 Not only is the user interface element itself identified, but a location
relative to the user interface element is
identified. Location-indicating tags therefore trivially support the capture
of an absolute pen path in the zone
of a particular user interface element.
An object-indicating tag contains a tag ID which directly identifies a user
interface element in the
page description associated with the region. All the tags in the zone of the
user interface element identify the
15 user interface element, making them all identical and therefore
indistinguishable. Object-indicating tags do
not, therefore, support the capture of an absolute pen path. They do, however,
support the capture of a
relative pen path. So long as the position sampling frequency exceeds twice
the encountered tag frequency,
the displacement from one sampled pen position to the next within a stroke can
be unambiguously
determined.
20 With either tagging scheme, the tags function in cooperation with
associated visual elements on
the netpage as user interactive elements in that a user can interact with the
printed page using an appropriate
sensing device in order for tag data to be read by the sensing device and for
an appropriate response to be
generated in the netpage system.

2'rJ 3 DOCUMENTAND PAGE DESCRIPTIONS
A preferred embodiment of a document and page description class diagram is
shown in Figures
12 and 13.
In the netpage system a document is described at three levels. At the most
abstract level the
document 836 has a hierarchical structure whose terminal elements 839 are
associated with content objects
30 840 such as text objects, text style objects, image objects, etc. Once the
document is printed on a printer with
a particular page size, the document is paginated and otherwise formatted.
Formatted terminal elements 835
will in some cases be associated with content objects which are different from
those associated with their
corresponding terminal elements, particularly where the content objects are
style-related. Each printed
instance of a document and page is also described separately, to allow input
captured through a particular
35 page instance 830 to be recorded separately from input captured through
other instances of the same page
description.
The presence of the most abstract document description on the page server
allows a a copy of a
document to be printed without being forced to accept the source document's
specific format. The user or a
printing press may be requesting a copy for a printer with a different page
size, for example. Conversely, the


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41
presence of the formatted document description on the page server allows the
page server to efficiently
interpret user actions on a particular printed page.
A formatted document 834 consists of a set of formatted page descriptions 5,
each of which
consists of a set of formatted terminal elements 835. Each formatted element
has a spatial extent or zone 58
on the page. This defines the active area of input elements such as hyperlinks
and input fields.
A document instance 831 corresponds to a formatted document 834. It consists
of a set of page
instances 830, each of which corresponds to a page description 5 of the
formatted document. Each page
instance 830 describes a single unique printed netpage 1, and records the page
ID 50 of the netpage. A page
instance is not part of a document instance if it represents a copy of a page
requested in isolation.
A page instance consists of a set of terminal element instances 832. An
element instance only
exists if it records instance-specific information. Thus, a hyperlink instance
exists for a hyperlink element
because it records a transaction ID 55 which is specific to the page instance,
and a field instance exists for a
field element because it records input specific to the page instance. An
element instance does not exist,
however, for static elements such as textflows.
A terminal element 839 can be a visual element or an input element. A visual
element can be a
static element 843 or a dyamnic element 846. An input element can be a
hyperlink element 844 or a field
element 845, as shown in Figure 14. A static element 843 can be a style
element 847 with an associated style
object 854, a textflow element 848 with an associated styled text object 855,
an image element 849 with an
associated image element 856, a graphic element 850 with an associated graphic
object 857, a video clip
element 851 with an associated video clip object 858, an audio clip element
852 with an associated audio clip
object 859, or a script element 853 with an associated script object 860, as
shown in Figure 15.
A page instance has a background field 833 which is used to record any digital
ink captured on
the page which does not apply to a specific input element.
In the preferred form of the invention, a tag map 811 is associated with each
page instance to
allow tags on the page to be translated into locations on the page.

4 THE NETPAGE NETWORK
In a preferred embodiment, a netpage network consists of a distributed set of
netpage page
servers 10, netpage registration servers 11, netpage ID servers 12, netpage
application servers 13, and
netpage relay devices 601 connected via a network 19 such as the Internet, as
shown in Figure 3.
The netpage registration server 11 is a server which records relationships
between users, pens,
printers and applications, and thereby authorizes various network activities.
It authenticates users and acts as
a signing proxy on behalf of authenticated users in application transactions.
It also provides handwriting
recognition services. As described above, a netpage page server 10 maintains
persistent information about
page descriptions and page instances. The netpage network includes any number
of page servers, each
handling a subset of page instances. Since a page server also maintains user
input values for each page
instance, clients such as netpage relays 601 send netpage input directly to
the appropriate page server. The
page server interprets any such input relative to the description of the
corresponding page.
A netpage ID server 12 allocates document IDs 51 on demand, and provides load-
balancing of


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42
page servers via its ID allocation scheme.
A netpage relay uses the Internet Distributed Name System (DNS), or similar,
to resolve a
netpage page ID 50 into the network address of the netpage page server
handling the corresponding page
instance.
A netpage application server 13 is a server which hosts interactive netpage
applications.
Netpage servers can be hosted on a variety of network server platforms from
manufacturers such
as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. Multiple netpage servers can run
concurrently on a single host, and a
single server can be distributed over a number of hosts. Some or all of the
functionality provided by netpage
servers, and in particular the functionality provided by the ID server and the
page server, can also be
provided directly in a netpage appliance such as a netpage printer, in a
computer workstation, or on a local
network.

4 THE NETPAGE PEN
The active sensing device of the netpage system may take the form of a clicker
(for clicking on a
specific position on a surface), a pointer having a stylus (for pointing or
gesturing on a surface using pointer
strokes), or a pen having a marking nib (for marking a surface with ink when
pointing, gesturing or writing
on the surface). A pen 101 is described herein, although it will be
appreciated that clickers and pointers may
be of similar construction. The pen 101 uses its embedded controller 134 to
capture and decode netpage tags
from a page via an image sensor. The image sensor is a solid-state device
provided with an appropriate filter
to permit sensing at only near-infrared wavelengths. As described in more
detail below, the system is able to
sense when the nib is in contact with the surface, and the pen is able to
sense tags at a sufficient rate to
capture human handwriting (i.e. at 200 dpi or greater and 100 Hz or faster).
Information captured by the pen
may be encrypted and wirelessly transmitted to the printer (or base station),
the printer or base station
interpreting the data with respect to the (known) page structure.
The preferred embodiment of the netpage pen 101 operates both as a normal
marking ink pen and
as a non-marking stylus (i.e. as a pointer). The marking aspect, however, is
not necessary for using the
netpage system as a browsing system, such as when it is used as an Internet
interface. Each netpage pen is
registered with the netpage system and has a unique pen ID 61. Figure 11 shows
the netpage pen class
diagram, reflecting pen-related information maintained by a registration
server 11 on the netpage network.
When the nib is in contact with a netpage, the pen determines its position and
orientation relative
to the page. The nib is attached to a force sensor, and the force on the nib
is interpreted relative to a threshold
to indicate whether the pen is "up" or "down". This allows a interactive
element on the page to be `clicked'
by pressing with the pen nib, in order to request, say, information from a
network. Furthermore, the force is
captured as a continuous value to allow, say, the full dynamics of a signature
to be verified.
The pen determines the position and orientation of its nib on the netpage by
imaging, in the
infrared spectrum, an area 193 of the page in the vicinity of the nib. It
decodes the nearest tag and computes
the position of the nib relative to the tag from the observed perspective
distortion on the imaged tag and the
known geometry of the pen optics. Although the position resolution of the tag
may be low, because the tag
density on the page is inversely proportional to the tag size, the adjusted
position resolution is quite high,


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43
exceeding the minimum resolution required for accurate handwriting
recognition.
Pen actions relative to a netpage are captured as a series of strokes. A
stroke consists of a
sequence of time-stamped pen positions on the page, initiated by a pen-down
event and completed by the
subsequent pen-up event. A stroke is also tagged with the page ID 50 of the
netpage whenever the page ID
changes, which, under normal circumstances, is at the commencement of the
stroke.
Each netpage pen has a current selection 826 associated with it, allowing the
user to perform copy
and paste operations etc. The selection is timestamped to allow the system to
discard it after a defined time
period. The current selection describes a region of a page instance. It
consists of the most recent digital ink
stroke captured through the pen relative to the background area of the page.
It is interpreted in an
application-specific manner once it is submitted to an application via a
selection hyperlink activation.
Each pen has a current nib 824. This is the nib last notified by the pen to
the system. In the case
of the default netpage pen described above, either the marking black ink nib
or the non-marking stylus nib is
current. Each pen also has a current nib style 825. This is the nib style last
associated with the pen by an
application, e.g. in response to the user selecting a color from a palette.
The default nib style is the nib style
associated with the current nib. Strokes captured through a pen are tagged
with the current nib style. When
the strokes are subsequently reproduced, they are reproduced in the nib style
with which they are tagged.
The pen 101 may have one or more buttons 209, which are pressed by the user to
select a mode of
the pen. As described in Section 9.3 below, the button(s) are used to
determine a behavior of the pen, which,
in turn, determines how a stroke is interpreted by the page server 10.
Whenever the pen is within range of a relay device 601 with which it can
communicate, the pen
slowly flashes its "online" LED. When the pen fails to decode a stroke
relative to the page, it momentarily
activates its "error" LED. When the pen succeeds in decoding a stroke relative
to the page, it momentarily
activates its "ok" LED.
A sequence of captured strokes is referred to as digital ink. Digital ink
forms the basis for the
digital exchange of drawings and handwriting, for online recognition of
handwriting, and for online
verification of signatures.
The pen is wireless and transmits digital ink to the relay device 601 via a
short-range radio link.
The transmitted digital ink is encrypted for privacy and security and
packetized for efficient transmission, but
is always flushed on a pen-up event to ensure timely handling in the printer.
When the pen is out-of-range of a relay device 601 it buffers digital ink in
internal memory,
which has a capacity of over ten minutes of continuous handwriting. When the
pen is once again within
range of a relay device, it transfers any buffered digital ink.
A pen can be registered with any number of relay devices, but because all
state data resides in
netpages both on paper and on the network, it is largely immaterial which
relay device a pen is
communicating with at any particular time.
One embodiment of the pen is described in greater detail in Section 7 below,
with reference to
Figures 8 to 10.


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6 NETPAGE INTERACTION
The netpage relay device 601 receives data relating to a stroke from the pen
101 when the pen is
used to interact with a netpage 1. The coded data 3 of the tags 4 is read by
the pen when it is used to execute
a movement, such as a stroke. The data allows the identity of the particular
page to be determined and an
indication of the positioning of the pen relative to the page to be obtained.
Interaction data comprising the
page ID 50 and at least one position of the pen, is transmitted to the relay
device 601, where it resolves, via
the DNS, the page ID 50 of the stroke into the network address of the netpage
page server 10 which
maintains the corresponding page instance 830. It then transmits the stroke to
the page server. If the page
was recently identified in an earlier stroke, then the relay device may
already have the address of the relevant
page server in its cache. Each netpage consists of a compact page layout
maintained persistently by a netpage
page server (see below). The page layout refers to objects such as images,
fonts and pieces of text, typically
stored elsewhere on the netpage network.
When the page server receives the stroke from the pen, it retrieves the page
description to which
the stroke applies, and determines which element of the page description the
stroke intersects. It is then able
to interpret the stroke in the context of the type of the relevant element.
A "click" is a stroke where the distance and time between the pen down
position and the
subsequent pen up position are both less than some small maximum. An object
which is activated by a click
typically requires a click to be activated, and accordingly, a longer stroke
is ignored. The failure of a pen
action, such as a "sloppy" click, to register may be indicated by the lack of
response from the pen's "ok"
LED.
There are two kinds of input elements in a netpage page description:
hyperlinks and form fields.
Input through a form field can also trigger the activation of an associated
hyperlink.

2'rJ 6.1 HYPERLINKS
A hyperlink is a means of sending a message to a remote application, and
typically elicits a
displayed or printed response in the netpage system.
A hyperlink element 844 identifies the application 71 which handles activation
of the hyperlink, a
link ID 54 which identifies the hyperlink to the application, an "alias
required" flag which asks the system to
include the user's application alias ID 65 in the hyperlink activation, and a
description which is used when
the hyperlink is recorded as a favorite or appears in the user's history. The
hyperlink element class diagram
is shown in Figure 16.
When a hyperlink is activated, the page server sends a request to an
application somewhere on the
network. The application is identified by an application ID 64, and the
application ID is resolved in the
normal way via the DNS. There are three types of hyperlinks: general
hyperlinks 863, form hyperlinks 865,
and selection hyperlinks 864, as shown in Figure 17. A general hyperlink can
implement a request for a
linked document, or may simply signal a preference to a server. A form
hyperlink submits the corresponding
form to the application. A selection hyperlink submits the current selection
to the application. If the current
selection contains a single-word piece of text, for example, the application
may return a single-page


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document giving the word's meaning within the context in which it appears, or
a translation into a different
language. Each hyperlink type is characterized by what information is
submitted to the application.
The corresponding hyperlink instance 862 records a transaction ID 55 which can
be specific to
the page instance on which the hyperlink instance appears. The transaction ID
can identify user-specific data
5 to the application, for example a "shopping cart" of pending purchases
maintained by a purchasing
application on behalf of the user.
The system includes the pen's current selection 826 in a selection hyperlink
activation. The
system includes the content of the associated form instance 868 in a form
hyperlink activation, although if
the hyperlink has its "submit delta" attribute set, only input since the last
form submission is included. The
10 system includes an effective return path in all hyperlink activations.
A hyperlinked group 866 is a group element 838 which has an associated
hyperlink, as shown in
Figure 18. When input occurs through any field element in the group, the
hyperlink 844 associated with the
group is activated. A hyperlinked group can be used to associate hyperlink
behavior with a field such as a
checkbox. It can also be used, in conjunction with the "submit delta"
attribute of a form hyperlink, to provide
15 continuous input to an application. It can therefore be used to support a
"blackboard" interaction model, i.e.
where input is captured and therefore shared as soon as it occurs.

6.2 HYPERLINK ACTIVATION PROTOCOL
A preferred embodiment of a hyperlink activation protocol is shown in Figure
42.
20 When a user clicks on a netpage with a netpage pen, the pen communicates
the click, in the form
of interaction data, to the nearest netpage relay device 601. The click
identifies the page and a location on the
page. The relay device 601 already knows the ID 61 of the pen from the pen
connection protocol.
The relay device 601 determines, via the DNS, the network address of the page
server 10
handling the particular page ID 50. The address may already be in its cache if
the user has recently interacted
25 with the same page. The relay device 601 then forwards the pen ID, its own
device ID 62, the page ID and
click location to the page server.
The page server loads the page description 5 identified by the page ID and
determines which
input element's zone 58, if any, the click lies in. Assuming the relevant
input element is a hyperlink element
844, the page server then obtains the associated application ID 64 and link ID
54, and determines, via the
30 DNS, the network address of the application server hosting the application
71.
The page server uses the pen ID 61 to obtain the corresponding user ID 60 from
the registration
server 11, and then allocates a globally unique hyperlink request ID 52 and
builds a hyperlink request 934.
The hyperlink request class diagram is shown in Figure 26. The hyperlink
request records the IDs of the
requesting user and relay device, and identifies the clicked hyperlink
instance 862. The page server then
35 sends its own server ID 53, the hyperlink request ID, and the link ID to
the application.
The application produces a response document according to application-specific
logic, and
obtains a document ID 51 from an ID server 12. It then sends the document to
the page server lOb
responsible for the document's newly allocated ID, together with the
requesting page server's ID and the
hyperlink request ID.


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The second page server sends the hyperlink request ID and application ID to
the first page server
to obtain the corresponding user ID and device ID 62. The first page server
rejects the request if the
hyperlink request has expired or is for a different application.
The second page server allocates document instance and page IDs 50, returns
the newly allocated
page IDs to the application, adds the complete document to its own database,
and finally sends the page
descriptions to the requesting relay device.
The hyperlink instance may include a meaningful transaction ID 55, in which
case the first page
server includes the transaction ID in the message sent to the application.
This allows the application to
establish a transaction-specific context for the hyperlink activation.
If the hyperlink requires a user alias, i.e. its "alias required" attribute is
set, then the first page
server sends both the pen ID 61 and the hyperlink's application ID 64 to the
registration server 11 to obtain
not just the user ID corresponding to the pen ID but also the alias ID 65
corresponding to the application ID
and the user ID. It includes the alias ID in the message sent to the
application, allowing the application to
establish a user-specific context for the hyperlink activation.
6.3 FORMS
A form defines a collection of related input fields used to capture a related
set of inputs through a
printed netpage. A form allows a user to submit one or more parameters to an
application software program
running on a server.
A form 867 is a group element 838 in the document hierarchy. It ultimately
contains a set of
terminal field elements 839. A form instance 868 represents a printed instance
of a form. It consists of a set
of field instances 870 which correspond to the field elements 845 of the form.
Each field instance has an
associated value 871, whose type depends on the type of the corresponding
field element. Each field value
records input through a particular printed form instance, i.e. through one or
more printed netpages. The form
class diagram is shown in Figure 19.
Each form instance has a status 872 which indicates whether the form is
active, frozen, submitted,
void or expired. A form is active when first printed. A form becomes frozen
once it is signed or once its
freeze time is reached. A form becomes submitted once one of its submission
hyperlinks has been activated,
unless the hyperlink has its "submit delta" attribute set. A form becomes void
when the user invokes a void
form, reset form or duplicate form page command. A form expires when its
specified expiry time is reached,
i.e. when the time the form has been active exceeds the form's specified
lifetime. While the form is active,
form input is allowed. Input through a form which is not active is instead
captured in the background field
833 of the relevant page instance. When the form is active or frozen, form
submission is allowed. Any
attempt to submit a form when the form is not active or frozen is rejected,
and instead elicits an form status
report.
Each form instance is associated (at 59) with any form instances derived from
it, thus providing a
version history. This allows all but the latest version of a form in a
particular time period to be excluded from
a search.
All input is captured as digital ink. Digital ink 873 consists of a set of
timestamped stroke groups


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874, each of which consists of a set of styled strokes 875. Each stroke
consists of a set of timestamped pen
positions 876, each of which also includes pen orientation and nib force. The
digital ink class diagram is
shown in Figure 20.
A field element 845 can be a checkbox field 877, a text field 878, a drawing
field 879, or a
signature field 880. The field element class diagram is shown in Figure 21.
Any digital ink captured in a
field's zone 58 is assigned to the field.
A checkbox field has an associated boolean value 881, as shown in Figure 22.
Any mark (a tick, a
cross, a stroke, a fill zigzag, etc.) captured in a checkbox field's zone
causes a true value to be assigned to
the field's value.
A text field has an associated text value 882, as shown in Figure 23. Any
digital ink captured in a
text field's zone is automatically converted to text via online handwriting
recognition, and the text is
assigned to the field's value. Online handwriting recognition is well-
understood (see, for example, Tappert,
C., C.Y. Suen and T. Wakahara, "The State of the Art in On-Line Handwriting
Recognition", IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol.12, No.8,
August 1990, the contents of
which are herein incorporated by cross-reference).
A signature field has an associated digital signature value 883, as shown in
Figure 24. Any digital
ink captured in a signature field's zone is automatically verified with
respect to the identity of the owner of
the pen, and a digital signature of the content of the form of which the field
is part is generated and assigned
to the field's value. The digital signature is generated using the pen user's
private signature key specific to
the application which owns the form. Online signature verification is well-
understood (see, for example,
Plamondon, R. and G. Lorette, "Automatic Signature Verification and Writer
Identification - The State of
the Art", Pattern Recognition, Vol.22, No.2, 1989, the contents of which are
herein incorporated by cross-
reference).
A field element is hidden if its "hidden" attribute is set. A hidden field
element does not have an
input zone on a page and does not accept input. It can have an associated
field value which is included in the
form data when the form containing the field is submitted.
"Editing" commands, such as strike-throughs indicating deletion, can also be
recognized in form
fields.
Because the handwriting recognition algorithm works "online" (i.e. with access
to the dynamics
of the pen movement), rather than "offline" (i.e. with access only to a bitmap
of pen markings), it can
recognize run-on discretely-written characters with relatively high accuracy,
without a writer-dependent
training phase. A writer-dependent model of handwriting is automatically
generated over time, however, and
can be generated up-front if necessary,
Digital ink, as already stated, consists of a sequence of strokes. Any stroke
which starts in a
particular element's zone is appended to that element's digital ink stream,
ready for interpretation. Any
stroke not appended to an object's digital ink stream is appended to the
background field's digital ink stream.
Digital ink captured in the background field is interpreted as a selection
gesture. Circumscription
of one or more objects is generally interpreted as a selection of the
circumscribed objects, although the actual
interpretation is application-specific.


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Table 2 summarises some typical pen interactions with a netpage.

Table 2 - Summary of typical pen interactions with a netpage
Object Type Pen input ction
Hyperlink General Click Submit action to application
Form Click Submit form to application
Selection Click Submit selection to application
Form field Checkbox ny mark ssign true to field
Text Handwriting Convert digital ink to text; assign text to
ield
Drawing Digital ink ssign digital ink to field
Signature Signature erify digital ink signature; generate
igital signature of form; assign digital
signature to field
None - Circumscription ssign digital ink to current selection

The system maintains a current selection for each pen. The selection consists
simply of the most
recent stroke captured in the background field. The selection is cleared after
an inactivity timeout to ensure
predictable behavior.
The raw digital ink captured in every field is retained on the netpage page
server and is optionally
transmitted with the form data when the form is submitted to the application.
This allows the application to
interrogate the raw digital ink should it suspect the original conversion,
such as the conversion of
handwritten text. This can, for example, involve human intervention at the
application level for forms which
fail certain application-specific consistency checks. As an extension to this,
the entire background area of a
form can be designated as a drawing field. The application can then decide, on
the basis of the presence of
digital ink outside the explicit fields of the form, to route the form to a
human operator, on the assumption
that the user may have indicated amendments to the filled-in fields outside of
those fields.
Figure 25 shows a flowchart of the process of handling pen input relative to a
netpage. The
process consists of receiving (at 884) a stroke from the pen; identifying (at
885) the page instance 830 to
which the page ID 50 in the stroke refers; retrieving (at 886) the page
description 5; identifying (at 887) a
formatted element 839 whose zone 58 the stroke intersects; determining (at
888) whether the formatted
element corresponds to a field element, and if so appending (at 892) the
received stroke to the digital ink of
the field value 871, interpreting (at 893) the accumulated digital ink of the
field, and determining (at 894)
whether the field is part of a hyperlinked group 866 and if so activating (at
895) the associated hyperlink;
alternatively determining (at 889) whether the formatted element corresponds
to a hyperlink element and if
so activating (at 895) the corresponding hyperlink; alternatively, in the
absence of an input field or hyperlink,
appending (at 890) the received stroke to the digital ink of the background
field 833; and copying (at 891)
the received stroke to the current selection 826 of the current pen, as
maintained by the registration server.
Figure 25a shows a detailed flowchart of step 893 in the process shown in
Figure 25, where the


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accumulated digital ink of a field is interpreted according to the type of the
field. The process consists of
determining (at 896) whether the field is a checkbox and (at 897) whether the
digital ink represents a
checkmark, and if so assigning (at 898) a true value to the field value;
alternatively determining (at 899)
whether the field is a text field and if so converting (at 900) the digital
ink to computer text, with the help of
the appropriate registration server, and assigning (at 901) the converted
computer text to the field value;
alternatively determining (at 902) whether the field is a signature field and
if so verifying (at 903) the digital
ink as the signature of the pen's owner, with the help of the appropriate
registration server, creating (at 904)
a digital signature of the contents of the corresponding form, also with the
help of the registration server and
using the pen owner's private signature key relating to the corresponding
application, and assigning (at 905)
the digital signature to the field value.

7 NETPAGE PEN AND PRINTER DESCRIPTION
7.1 PEN MECHANICS
Referring to Figures 8 and 9, the pen, generally designated by reference
numeral 101, includes a
housing 102 in the form of a plastics moulding having walls 103 defining an
interior space 104 for mounting
the pen components. Mode selector buttons 209 are provided on the housing 102.
The pen top 105 is in
operation rotatably mounted at one end 106 of the housing 102. A semi-
transparent cover 107 is secured to
the opposite end 108 of the housing 102. The cover 107 is also of moulded
plastics, and is formed from
semi-transparent material in order to enable the user to view the status of
the LED mounted within the
housing 102. The cover 107 includes a main part 109 which substantially
surrounds the end 108 of the
housing 102 and a projecting portion 110 which projects back from the main
part 109 and fits within a
corresponding slot 111 formed in the walls 103 of the housing 102. A radio
antenna 112 is mounted behind
the projecting portion 110, within the housing 102. Screw threads 113
surrounding an aperture 11 3A on the
cover 107 are arranged to receive a metal end piece 114, including
corresponding screw threads 115. The
metal end piece 114 is removable to enable ink cartridge replacement.
Also mounted within the cover 107 is a tri-color status LED 116 on a flex PCB
117. The antenna
112 is also mounted on the flex PCB 117. The status LED 116 is mounted at the
top of the pen 101 for good
all-around visibility.
The pen can operate both as a normal marking ink pen and as a non-marking
stylus. An ink pen
cartridge 118 with nib 119 and a stylus 120 with stylus nib 121 are mounted
side by side within the housing
102. Either the ink cartridge nib 119 or the stylus nib 121 can be brought
forward through open end 122 of
the metal end piece 114, by rotation of the pen top 105. Respective slider
blocks 123 and 124 are mounted to
the ink cartridge 118 and stylus 120, respectively. A rotatable cam barrel 125
is secured to the pen top 105 in
operation and arranged to rotate therewith. The cam barrel 125 includes a cam
126 in the form of a slot
within the walls 181 of the cam barrel. Cam followers 127 and 128 projecting
from slider blocks 123 and
124 fit within the cam slot 126. On rotation of the cam barrel 125, the slider
blocks 123 or 124 move relative
to each other to project either the pen nib 119 or stylus nib 121 out through
the hole 122 in the metal end
piece 114. The pen 101 has three states of operation. By turning the top 105
through 90 steps, the three
states are:


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= Stylus 120 nib 121 out;
= Ink cartridge 118 nib 119 out; and
= Neither ink cartridge 118 nib 119 out nor stylus 120 nib 121 out.
A second flex PCB 129, is mounted on an electronics chassis 130 which sits
within the housing
5 102. The second flex PCB 129 mounts an infrared LED 131 for providing
infrared radiation for projection
onto the surface. An image sensor 132 is provided mounted on the second flex
PCB 129 for receiving
reflected radiation from the surface. The second flex PCB 129 also mounts a
radio frequency chip 133,
which includes an RF transmitter and RF receiver, and a controller chip 134
for controlling operation of the
pen 101. An optics block 135 (formed from moulded clear plastics) sits within
the cover 107 and projects an
10 infrared beam onto the surface and receives images onto the image sensor
132. Power supply wires 136
connect the components on the second flex PCB 129 to battery contacts 137
which are mounted within the
cam barrel 125. A terminal 138 connects to the battery contacts 137 and the
cam barrel 125. A three volt
rechargeable battery 139 sits within the cam barrel 125 in contact with the
battery contacts. An induction
charging coil 140 is mounted about the second flex PCB 129 to enable
recharging of the battery 139 via
15 induction. The second flex PCB 129 also mounts an infrared LED 143 and
infrared photodiode 144 for
detecting displacement in the cam barrel 125 when either the stylus 120 or the
ink cartridge 118 is used for
writing, in order to enable a determination of the force being applied to the
surface by the pen nib 119 or
stylus nib 121. The IR photodiode 144 detects light from the IR LED 143 via
reflectors (not shown) mounted
on the slider blocks 123 and 124.
20 Rubber grip pads 141 and 142 are provided towards the end 108 of the
housing 102 to assist
gripping the pen 101, and top 105 also includes a clip 142 for clipping the
pen 101 to a pocket.

7.2 PEN CONTROLLER
The pen 101 is arranged to determine the position of its nib (stylus nib 121
or ink cartridge nib
25 119) by imaging, in the infrared spectrum, an area of the surface in the
vicinity of the nib. It records the
location data from the nearest location tag, and is arranged to calculate the
distance of the nib 121 or 119
from the location tab utilising optics 135 and controller chip 134. The
controller chip 134 calculates the
orientation of the pen and the nib-to-tag distance from the perspective
distortion observed on the imaged tag.
Utilising the RF chip 133 and antenna 112 the pen 101 can transmit the digital
ink data (which is
30 encrypted for security and packaged for efficient transmission) to the
computing system.
When the pen is in range of a relay device 601, the digital ink data is
transmitted as it is formed.
When the pen 101 moves out of range, digital ink data is buffered within the
pen 101 (the pen 101 circuitry
includes a buffer arranged to store digital ink data for approximately 12
minutes of the pen motion on the
surface) and can be transmitted later.
35 In Applicant's US Patent No. 6,870,966, the contents of which is
incorporated herein by
reference, a pen 101 having an interchangeable ink cartridge nib and stylus
nib was described. Accordingly,
and referring to Figure 27, when the pen 101 connects to the computing system,
the controller 134 notifies
the system of the pen ID, nib ID 175, current absolute time 176, and the last
absolute time it obtained from
the system prior to going offline. The pen ID allows the computing system to
identify the pen when there is


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51
more than one pen being operated with the computing system.
The nib ID allows the computing system to identify which nib (stylus nib 121
or ink cartridge nib
119) is presently being used. The computing system can vary its operation
depending upon which nib is
being used. For example, if the ink cartridge nib 119 is being used the
computing system may defer
producing feedback output because immediate feedback is provided by the ink
markings made on the
surface. Where the stylus nib 121 is being used, the computing system may
produce immediate feedback
output.
Since a user may change the nib 119, 121 between one stroke and the next, the
pen 101 optionally
records a nib ID for a stroke 175. This becomes the nib ID implicitly
associated with later strokes.
Cartridges having particular nib characteristics may be interchangeable in the
pen. The pen
controller 134 may interrogate a cartridge to obtain the nib ID 175 of the
cartridge. The nib ID 175 may be
stored in a ROM or a barcode on the cartridge. The controller 134 notifies the
system of the nib ID whenever
it changes. The system is thereby able to determine the characteristics of the
nib used to produce a stroke
175, and is thereby subsequently able to reproduce the characteristics of the
stroke itself.
The controller chip 134 is mounted on the second flex PCB 129 in the pen 101.
Figure 10 is a
block diagram illustrating in more detail the architecture of the controller
chip 134. Figure 10 also shows
representations of the RF chip 133, the image sensor 132, the tri-color status
LED 116, the IR illumination
LED 131, the IR force sensor LED 143, and the force sensor photodiode 144.
The pen controller chip 134 includes a controlling processor 145. Bus 146
enables the exchange
of data between components of the controller chip 134. Flash memory 147 and a
512 KB DRAM 148 are
also included. An analog-to-digital converter 149 is arranged to convert the
analog signal from the force
sensor photodiode 144 to a digital signal.
An image sensor interface 152 interfaces with the image sensor 132. A
transceiver controller 153
and base band circuit 154 are also included to interface with the RF chip 133
which includes an RF circuit
155 and RF resonators and inductors 156 connected to the antenna 112.
The controlling processor 145 captures and decodes location data from tags
from the surface via
the image sensor 132, monitors the force sensor photodiode 144, controls the
LEDs 116, 131 and 143, and
handles short-range radio communication via the radio transceiver 153. It is a
medium-performance
(-40MHz) general-purpose RISC processor.
The processor 145, digital transceiver components (transceiver controller 153
and baseband
circuit 154), image sensor interface 152, flash memory 147 and 512KB DRAM 148
are integrated in a single
controller ASIC. Analog RF components (RF circuit 155 and RF resonators and
inductors 156) are provided
in the separate RF chip.
The image sensor is a 215x215 pixel CCD (such a sensor is produced by
Matsushita Electronic
Corporation, and is described in a paper by Itakura, K T Nobusada, N Okusenya,
R Nagayoshi, and M
Ozaki, "A 1mm 50k-Pixel IT CCD Image Sensor for Miniature Camera System", IEEE
Transactions on
Electronic Devices, Volt 47, number 1, January 2000, which is incorporated
herein by reference) with an IR
filter.
The controller ASIC 134 enters a quiescent state after a period of inactivity
when the pen 101 is


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52
not in contact with a surface. It incorporates a dedicated circuit 150 which
monitors the force sensor
photodiode 144 and wakes up the controller 134 via the power manager 151 on a
pen-down event.
The radio transceiver communicates in the unlicensed 900MHz band normally used
by cordless
telephones, or alternatively in the unlicensed 2.4GHz industrial, scientific
and medical (ISM) band, and uses
frequency hopping and collision detection to provide interference-free
communication.
In an alternative embodiment, the pen incorporates an Infrared Data
Association (IrDA) interface
for short-range communication with a base station or netpage printer.
In a further embodiment, the pen 101 includes a pair of orthogonal
accelerometers mounted in the
normal plane of the pen 101 axis. The accelerometers 190 are shown in Figures
9 and 10 in ghost outline.
The provision of the accelerometers enables this embodiment of the pen 101 to
sense motion
without reference to surface location tags, allowing the location tags to be
sampled at a lower rate. Each
location tag ID can then identify an object of interest rather than a position
on the surface. For example, if
the object is a user interface input element (e.g. a command button), then the
tag ID of each location tag
within the area of the input element can directly identify the input element.
The acceleration measured by the accelerometers in each of the x and y
directions is integrated
with respect to time to produce an instantaneous velocity and position.
Since the starting position of the stroke is not known, only relative
positions within a stroke are
calculated. Although position integration accumulates errors in the sensed
acceleration, accelerometers
typically have high resolution, and the time duration of a stroke, over which
errors accumulate, is short.

7.3 THE NETPAGE PRINTER
The netpage printer 601b is an appliance which is registered with the netpage
system and prints
netpage documents on demand and via subscription. Each printer has a unique
printer ID 62, and is
connected to the netpage network via a network such as the Internet, ideally
via a broadband connection.

Apart from identity and security settings in non-volatile memory, the netpage
printer contains no
persistent storage. As far as a user is concerned, "the network is the
computer". Netpages function
interactively across space and time with the help of the distributed netpage
page servers 10, independently of
particular netpage printers.

The netpage printer receives subscribed netpage documents from netpage
publication servers 14.
Each document is distributed in two parts: the page layouts, and the actual
text and image objects which
populate the pages. Because of personalization, page layouts are typically
specific to a particular subscriber
and so are pointcast to the subscriber's printer via the appropriate page
server. Text and image objects, on the
other hand, are typically shared with other subscribers, and so are multicast
to all subscribers' printers and
the appropriate page servers.

The netpage publication server optimizes the segmentation of document content
into pointcasts
and multicasts. After receiving the pointcast of a document's page layouts,
the printer knows which
multicasts, if any, to listen to.

Once the printer has received the complete page layouts and objects that
define the document to


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53
be printed, it can print the document.

The printer rasterizes and prints odd and even pages simultaneously on both
sides of the sheet. It
contains duplexed print engine controllers 760 and print engines utilizing
MemjetTM printheads 350 for this
purpose.

The printing process consists of two decoupled stages: rasterization of page
descriptions, and
expansion and printing of page images. The raster image processor (RIP)
consists of one or more standard
DSPs 757 running in parallel. The duplexed print engine controllers consist of
custom processors which
expand, dither and print page images in real time, synchronized with the
operation of the printheads in the
print engines.

Printers not enabled for IR printing have the option to print tags using IR-
absorptive black ink,
although this restricts tags to otherwise empty areas of the page. Although
such pages have more limited
functionality than IR-printed pages, they are still classed as netpages.

A normal netpage printer prints netpages on sheets of paper. More specialised
netpage printers
may print onto more specialised surfaces, such as globes. Each printer
supports at least one surface type, and
supports at least one tag tiling scheme, and hence tag map, for each surface
type. The tag map 811 which
describes the tag tiling scheme actually used to print a document becomes
associated with that document so
that the document's tags can be correctly interpreted.

7.4 PRINTER CONTROLLER ARCHITECTURE
The netpage printer controller consists of a controlling processor 750, a
factory-installed or field-
installed network interface module 625, a radio transceiver (transceiver
controller 753, baseband circuit 754,
RF circuit 755, and RF resonators and inductors 756), dual raster image
processor (RIP) DSPs 757, duplexed
print engine controllers 760a and 760b, flash memory 658, and 64MB of DRAM
657, as illustrated in Figure
28.

The controlling processor handles communication with the network 19 and with
local wireless
netpage pens 101, senses the help button 617, controls the user interface LEDs
613-616, and feeds and
synchronizes the RIP DSPs 757 and print engine controllers 760. It consists of
a medium-performance
general-purpose microprocessor. The controlling processor 750 communicates
with the print engine
controllers 760 via a high-speed serial bus 659.

The RIP DSPs rasterize and compress page descriptions to the netpage printer's
compressed page
format. Each print engine controller expands, dithers and prints page images
to its associated MemjetTM
printhead 350 in real time (i.e. at over 30 pages per minute). The duplexed
print engine controllers print both
sides of a sheet simultaneously.

The master print engine controller 760a controls the paper transport and
monitors ink usage in
conjunction with the master QA chip 665 and the ink cartridge QA chip 761.

The printer controller's flash memory 658 holds the software for both the
processor 750 and the


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DSPs 757, as well as configuration data. This is copied to main memory 657 at
boot time.

The processor 750, DSPs 757, and digital transceiver components (transceiver
controller 753 and
baseband circuit 754) are integrated in a single controller ASIC 656. Analog
RF components (RF circuit 755
and RF resonators and inductors 756) are provided in a separate RF chip 762.
The network interface module
625 is separate, since netpage printers allow the network connection to be
factory-selected or field-selected.
Flash memory 658 and the 2x256Mbit (64MB) DRAM 657 is also off-chip. The print
engine controllers 760
are provided in separate ASICs.

A variety of network interface modules 625 are provided, each providing a
netpage network
interface 751 and optionally a local computer or network interface 752.
Netpage network Internet interfaces
include POTS modems, Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC) cable modems, ISDN modems, DSL
modems, satellite
transceivers, current and next-generation cellular telephone transceivers, and
wireless local loop (WLL)
transceivers. Local interfaces include IEEE 1284 (parallel port), 10Base-T and
100Base-T Ethernet, USB
and USB 2.0, IEEE 1394 (Firewire), and various emerging home networking
interfaces. If an Internet
connection is available on the local network, then the local network interface
can be used as the netpage
network interface.

The radio transceiver 753 communicates in the unlicensed 900MHz band normally
used by
cordless telephones, or alternatively in the unlicensed 2.4GHz industrial,
scientific and medical (ISM) band,
and uses frequency hopping and collision detection to provide interference-
free communication.

The printer controller optionally incorporates an Infrared Data Association
(IrDA) interface for
receiving data "squirted" from devices such as netpage cameras. In an
alternative embodiment, the printer
uses the IrDA interface for short-range communication with suitably configured
netpage pens.

7.4.1 RASTERIZATION AND PRINTING
Once the main processor 750 has received and verified the document's page
layouts and page
objects, it runs the appropriate RIP software on the DSPs 757.

The DSPs 757 rasterize each page description and compress the rasterized page
image. The main
processor stores each compressed page image in memory. The simplest way to
load-balance multiple DSPs is
to let each DSP rasterize a separate page. The DSPs can always be kept busy
since an arbitrary number of
rasterized pages can, in general, be stored in memory. This strategy only
leads to potentially poor DSP
utilization when rasterizing short documents.

Watermark regions in the page description are rasterized to a contone-
resolution bi-level bitmap
which is losslessly compressed to negligible size and which forms part of the
compressed page image.

The infrared (IR) layer of the printed page contains coded netpage tags at a
density of about six
per inch. Each tag encodes the page ID, tag ID, and control bits, and the data
content of each tag is generated
during rasterization and stored in the compressed page image.

The main processor 750 passes back-to-back page images to the duplexed print
engine controllers
760. Each nrint enLyine controller 760 stores the compressed page image in its
local memory, and starts the


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page expansion and printing pipeline. Page expansion and printing is pipelined
because it is impractical to
store an entire 114MB bi-level CMYK+IR page image in memory.

7.4.2 PRINT ENGINE CONTROLLER
The page expansion and printing pipeline of the print engine controller 760
consists of a high
5 speed IEEE 1394 serial interface 659, a standard JPEG decoder 763, a
standard Group 4 Fax decoder 764, a
custom halftoner/compositor unit 765, a custom tag encoder 766, a line
loader/formatter unit 767, and a
custom interface 768 to the MemjetTM printhead 350.

The print engine controller 360 operates in a double buffered manner. While
one page is loaded
into DRAM 769 via the high speed serial interface 659, the previously loaded
page is read from DRAM 769
10 and passed through the print engine controller pipeline. Once the page has
finished printing, the page just
loaded is printed while another page is loaded.

The first stage of the pipeline expands (at 763) the JPEG-compressed contone
CMYK layer,
expands (at 764) the Group 4 Fax-compressed bi-level black layer, and renders
(at 766) the bi-level netpage
tag layer according to the tag format defined in section 1.2, all in parallel.
The second stage dithers (at 765)
15 the contone CMYK layer and composites (at 765) the bi-level black layer
over the resulting bi-level CMYK
layer. The resultant bi-level CMYK+IR dot data is buffered and formatted (at
767) for printing on the
MemjetTM printhead 350 via a set of line buffers. Most of these line buffers
are stored in the off-chip DRAM.
The final stage prints the six channels of bi-level dot data (including
fixative) to the MemjetTM printhead 350
via the printhead interface 768.

20 When several print engine controllers 760 are used in unison, such as in a
duplexed
configuration, they are synchronized via a shared line sync signal 770. Only
one print engine 760, selected
via the external master/slave pin 771, generates the line sync signa1770 onto
the shared line.

The print engine controller 760 contains a low-speed processor 772 for
synchronizing the page
expansion and rendering pipeline, configuring the printhead 350 via a low-
speed serial bus 773, and
25 controlling the stepper motors 675, 676.

In the 8~/2" versions of the netpage printer, the two print engines each
prints 30 Letter pages per
minute along the long dimension of the page (11"), giving a line rate of 8.8
kHz at 1600 dpi. In the 12"
versions of the netpage printer, the two print engines each prints 45 Letter
pages per minute along the short
dimension of the page (8~/2"), giving a line rate of 10.2 kHz. These line
rates are well within the operating
30 frequency of the MemjetTM printhead, which in the current design exceeds 30
kHz.

8 SELECTION OF OBJECTS VIA NETPAGES
8.1 CONTENT SELECTION AND ASSOCIATION OF OBJECTS
The netpage system provides a mechanism to allow users to select an object on
a printed netpage
35 and submit it to an application, e.g. to associate the selected object with
another object in the netpage system.
In one preferred embodiment, the selection mechanism is effected by
circumscribing the


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graphical representation of an object using the netpage pen. The user may then
submit the selected object to
an application by activating a selection hyperlink via the same or another
printed netpage.
The registration server maintains a current selection for each pen, describing
a region of a page
instance from which the selection has been made. This description includes the
most recent digital ink stroke
captured by way of transmitted signals from the pen relative to the background
area of the page. Pen strokes
are interpreted in an application-specific manner once they are submitted to
an application via a selection
hyperlink activation. When the user `clicks' on a selection hyperlink, the
page server obtains the pen's
current selection from the registration server and transmits it to the
corresponding application as part of the
selection hyperlink activation, thus associating the two objects.
When the application receives a selection hyperlink activation, it retrieves
the content of the
selection from the page server which manages the page from which the selection
was made. The application
may then retrieve the selection as formatted data, allowing it to interpret
the object in the form of the selected
region in an application-specific manner in relation to the formatted data, or
as unformatted data, allowing it
to rely on the page server to interpret the selection region in a meaningful
way.
When requesting unformatted data, the application may specify a desired scope
to assist the
interpretation of the selected region by the page server. Possible scopes
include letter, word, phrase, line,
paragraph and article. If the page server is unable to interpret the selection
region according to the desired
scope, it may reject the application's request for the content of the
selection.
The selection content returned by the page server to the application may
include field values.
Typically however, only field values which have been submitted as part of a
form submission are included.
An author of a document can assist selection of articles by grouping all the
elements of an article
into an article group 507, as shown in Figure 31. If the application specifies
an article as the scope in its
selection request, the page server attempts to find an article group related
to the selection region.
The protocol for selection hyperlink activation and subsequent selection
content retrieval,
illustrated diagrammatically in Figure 34, operates as follows.
When page server A receives a selection hyperlink `click', it retrieves 510
the current selection
associated with the pen from the registration server. The selection is
described by a page ID 511 and a region
512. The page server then constructs a selection hyperlink request 508 (i.e. a
specialization of the hyperlink
request 934, shown in Figure 26). The selection hyperlink request contains the
pen's current selection as
shown in Figure 32. The page server then transmits its own server ID, the
hyperlink request ID, and the link
ID to the application in the usual way. It also sends the pen's current
selection to the application. The
application uses the page ID in the current selection to identify the page
server managing the page on which
the selection was made (ie. page server A). It then requests the content of
the selection from this page server
in the desired format 514 and according to the desired scope 513. Page server
B uses the server ID and
hyperlink request ID supplied by the application to obtain the selection from
original page server A. Page
server B obtains the selection from page server A rather than from the
application in order to ensure that the
application does not modify the selection to obtain information not intended
by the user.
As an alternative, page server A could sign the selection sent to the
application, allowing page
server B to easily verify that the selection supplied by the application has
not been modified. Once page


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server B has the selection, it retrieves the selected page from its database
and determines the content of the
selection according to the application's desired format and scope. Finally the
page server returns the
selection content 515 to the application for application-specific processing.
If the page on which the selection was made was generated by the same
application as that
handling the selection hyperlink activation, then the application has direct
access to the page (i.e. the
application can retrieve the entire page from the relevant page server by way
of the page ID of the page) and
may already have done so before the selection hyperlink is activated. In this
case, the application preferably
interprets the selection region without reference to the selection content
retrieval mechanism.
Selection of an object may of course alternatively be performed using a
draggable command. This
has an advantage in that a selection stroke can be distinguished from a normal
input stroke wherever the
stroke is made. The user may therefore select an object without inadvertently
entering an input stroke into a
field. As such, a user is also able to select an object that resides entirely
within a field relatively easily.
The application may define the selection command in the form of a selection
page server
command 509, as shown in Figure 33. This may be placed in a standard location
on all netpages, to provide
consistent support for selection in much the same way that there is consistent
support for page duplication.
When a selection page server command is activated by a user, the page server
forwards the
corresponding stroke to the registration server to be recorded as the current
selection for the pen. Apart from
this difference, the selection mechanism operates in the same way as
previously described.
As an example, in a netpage e-mail application, clicking on an <attach> button
at the bottom of
every e-mail composition page effects attachment of the current selection at
the current end of the body of
the e-mail. The attachment can consist of any object or objects, which are
capable of selection, on any
netpage page. The user may have made this selection from, say, selecting text
(eg.
word/sentence/paragraph/article) from another netpage page, or selecting a
photograph (eg. by
circumscription) from a photo collection page. The entire e-mail may then be
reprinted with the attachment
included, additional pages being automatically added to the e-mail to
accommodate the attachment.

8.1 TEXT SELECTION AND OPERATIONS THEREON
Figure 35 shows the styled text object 855 of Figure 15 decomposed into a set
of styled
paragraphs 1012, styled words 1014 and styled characters 1016. Styling may be
applied at any level. In the
absence of styling at a particular level styling is inherited from the parent
level. Each styled character 1016
has an associated character code. This may utilize the Unicode encoding scheme
or another encoding
scheme.
A formatted element 835 associated with a textflow element 848 is a formatted
textflow fragment
1018. The formatted textflow fragment consists of a set of formatted text
lines 1020. Each formatted text line
has a spatial extent or zone on the page. Each formatted text line consists of
a set of formatted word
fragments 1022, each of which has its own zone. The zone of formatted text
line is the union of the zones of
its word fragments. Each formatted word fragment is associated with a styled
word 1014. Where a styled
word is broken across multiple lines it has multiple formatted word fragments.
Where the entire styled word
lies within a single line it has a single formatted word fragment. Each
formatted word fragment consists of a


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set of formatted characters 1024, each of which has a zone and is associated
with a styled character. The
zone of a formatted word fragment is the union of the zones of its formatted
characters.
Figure 36 shows a fragment 1030 of a printed page bearing a single two-line
paragraph of text.
The words ("in Spain") are shown circumscribed by a stroke 1032 of a netpage
pen.
Figure 37 shows a fragment 1034 of a printed page including a set of command
buttons 1036,
1038, 1040, 1042, 1044 and 1046 designed to operate on the current selection.
It also includes a text field
1048 for entering an arbitrary text string.
Figure 38 shows part of the object diagram corresponding to the styled text of
Figure 36. The
styled text consists of a single styled paragraph 1012a, the first two styled
words 1014a and 1014b of which
are shown. Because the words are unbroken, they consist of one formatted word
fragment each, 1022a and
1022b respectively. The two styled words each consists of a set of styled
characters 1016a-c and 1016d-g
respectively. The two formatted word fragments each consists of a set of
formatted characters 1022a-c and
1022d-g respectively. As shown in the Figure, formatted character 1022d
corresponds to the initial letter "r"
of "rain".
The user can utilize a number of different pen gestures to effect text
selection,as described in
more detail in Section 9.2 below. A click on a word can be used to select that
word (see Figure 41). The
position of the click is compared with the zone of each word, and the word
whose zone it lies within is
selected. Circumscription (or lassoing) can be used to select of one or more
words. The degree of overlap
between the region enclosed by the circumscribing stroke and the zone of each
word is used to determine
whether the word is selected. The required overlap can be configured by the
user. Underlining can be used to
select one or more words (see Figure 42). A line-like stroke which doesn't
otherwise select any words is
interpreted as an underline. Since the orientation of the text is known, the
text which lies above the
underlining stroke can be identified.
As described previously, the current selection is available to an application
which is the target of
a selection hyperlink 864. When an application receives a selection hyperlink
activation, it can request the
current selection.
A number of useful applications can utilize text selections. The selected text
can be copied to the
clipboard of the user's graphical user interface (GUI) operating system (e.g.
Microsoft Windows, Apple
Macintosh OS X, or Linux) for use by other GUI applications. Figure 37 shows a
<copy text> command
button 1038 which causes the currently selected text to be copied to the
clipboard. Variants of this function
can be provided, such as <copy & paste text> which copies and then pastes the
selected text into the
currently active GUI application. Under Microsoft Windows this can usually be
effected by inserting a
control-V keystroke into the keystroke input queue. It can also be effected
using Windows Automation, by
identifying and invoking the current application's Paste method.
In addition to utilizing an explicit <copy text> command, the user can operate
in a mode where all
strokes, if interpretable as selection strokes, cause the selected text to be
automatically copied to the
clipboard of the GUI operating system. The user can also cause such copying to
occur by utilizing one or
more specific gestures, such as tapping on a word twice, or circumscribing a
set of words twice, or writing
the letter "C" and then circling it.


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Figure 37 shows a <search> command button 1040 which causes the currently
selected text to be
used in a search, such as a search of the World-wide Web using a search engine
such as Google or Yahoo!.
Invoking a Web search engine consists of constructing a URI which identifies
the search engine and includes
the selected text as a parameter, and then issuing an HTTP GET or POST using
that URI. For example, in the
case of Google it's a matter of appending the selected text to
"http://www.google.com /search?q=",
separating multiple words by "+", and optionally enclosing multiple words in
quotes ("%22") to cause them
to be interpreted as a single phrase. The result of the search is either
displayed on the user's desktop or
mobile computer, on the user's mobile phone or PDA, or is printed on a netpage
printer, all according to the
user's configured preference. The search command may also be linked to a
search of the user's personal file
system.
Figure 37 shows a <dictionary> command button 1042 which causes the currently
selected text to
be used in a dictionary lookup, such as a lookup using a Web-based dictionary.
The result is either displayed
or printed according to the user's configured preference.
Figure 37 shows an <encyclopedia> command button 1044 which causes the
currently selected
text to be used in an encyclopedia lookup, such as a lookup using a Web-based
encyclopedia such as
wikipedia. The result is either displayed or printed according to the user's
configured preference.
Figure 37 shows a <translate> command button 1046 which causes the currently
selected text to
be translated into the user's preferred (or previously specified) language.
The language of selected text is
often known from the resource description 842 associated with the styled text
object 855. Where the
document 836 is derived from a Webpage, the language is commonly known. The
result is either displayed,
printed or output as sampled or synthesized audio according to the user's
configured preference.
Each command button 1038 through 1046 is implemented as a selection hyperlink.
When user invokes a selection hyperlink which causes the target application to
request the
currently selected text, it is possible for the most recent strokes entered by
the user to lie in a text field. As a
configurable option (and as a per-request option) the system delivers the
corresponding recognized text in
place of any previously selected text.
Figure 37 shows a text field 1048. This is provided for the convenience of the
user to allow the
user to manually enter text to be processed in the same way as a text
selection, as described in the previous
paragraph.
The entire collection of command buttons shown in Figure 37, as well as the
text field 1048, can
be provided for the user's convenience on a separate "command card", or can be
optionally printed as a
"command bar" at the bottom of every page.
As described earlier in relation to the <copy text> command, the user can also
invoke these
commands by utilizing a specific gestures, such as writing a corresponding
letter and then circling it, e.g. "C"
for <copy>, "S" for <search>, "D" for <dictionary>, "E" for <encyclopedia>,
and "T' for <translate>.

8.2 ARBITRARY OBJECT SELECTION AND CLIPPINGS
An application which is a target of a selection hyperlink can query the
content of the most recent
selection, and can specify the format that the selection should be returned
in. For example, the application


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can use the selection to retrieve text (a word, multiple words, a line,
multiple lines, a paragraph, an article,
etc.), an object (such as any of the object types listed in Figure 15), a
page, or the entire document. In the
latter case the Netpage system can export the document as a self-contained
file, or provide a portable
reference to it (with the unique document ID or document instance ID encoded
in a URI).
5 The application may also request a "clipping", i.e. graphic page content
clipped to the most recent
selection stroke. A clipping optionally remains active, i.e. hyperlinks and/or
fields embedded in the page
become part of the clipping, e.g. encoded in HTML. A clipping includes, by
default, any digital ink strokes
on the original page.
Figure 37 shows a <copy image> command button 1036. It causes the currently
selected image or
10 clipping to be copied to the clipboard of the GUI operating system for use
by other GUI applications. The
user selects an image by tapping it. The user selects a clipping by
circumscribing it.
Many other commands which copy objects to the clipboard of the GUI operating
system are
possible. It is also possible to provide a generic <copy> command which causes
the current selection to be
advertised on the clipboard in multiple formats (e.g. plain text, rich text,
HTML, image, document, or
15 document reference). The GUI application which retrieves the selection from
the clipboard can then allow
the user to select the desired format. Most GUI operating systems allow a form
of "lazy" copying to the
clipboard, where the copying application initially only copies an object
reference to the clipboard, and only
copies the object to the clipboard in its final format once it is notified
that an application has attempted to
retrieve the object from the clipboard.
9 IMPROVEMENTS IN NETPAGE FUNCTIONALITY
In Section 1.3, recordal of digital ink in a background field 833 was
described. The background
field 833 records any digital ink which does not apply to any specific input
element, as determined using the
page description.
Rather than merely recording such digital ink in a background field, it would
be desirable to
provide a netpage user with useful information upon every interaction with a
netpage, irrespective of whether
the user has interacted with a specific input element on a netpage. This would
not only enhance the service
provided to netpage users, but also encourages use of the netpage system. In
Section 8.3, operations
performed on text selected by the sensing device were described. For example,
selected text may be inserted
into a web keyword search engine (e.g Google) to provide feedback to a user.
Searching based on selected
text provides a means for delivering useful information to the user with each
interaction with a netpage,
especially if such searches are enhanced with contextual information.
Alternatively, a user may wish to receive information based on keyword
searching, even if the
keyword is contained in an input element on a netpage.
As used herein, the term "keyword" is used to mean a keyword or key-phrase. In
other words, a
"keyword" is a term which may comprise more than one word.


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9.1 BAsic ARCHITECTURE FOR IMPROVED FUNCTIONALITY
9.1.1 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The basic architecture required for keyword and/or contextual searching may be
essentially the
same as that already described in connection with Figures 1 and 3.
Referring to Figure 39, a user interacts with a printed netpage 1 using a
sensing device 101, such
as netpage clicker, pointer or pen. The sensing device 101 reads and decodes
coded data on the printed
netpage 1. As described earlier, the coded data is typically in the form of
tags 4 tiled over the printed page 1,
or the coded data may be in the form of one or more barcodes.
The sensing device 101 then transmits interaction data to a user's local relay
device 601. The
interaction data typically identifies the printed page (or a region thereof)
and at least one position of the
sensing device relative to the page 1. The interaction data is generated by
the sensing device 601 using coded
data read by the sensing device when interacting with the printed netpage 1.
As described earlier, the relay device 601 typically comprises a user display
and web browser.
The relay device may be a portable device, such as a mobile phone or PDA, or
it may be a laptop computer,
desktop computer or information appliance connected to a shared display such
as a TV.
Once the relay device 601 has received the interaction data from the sensing
device 101, it then
relays this interaction data to the page server 10. The interaction data may
be encoded into a suitable form by
the relay device 601 before being relayed to the page server 10. As shown in
Figure 39, the relay device 601
encodes the interaction data into a URI and then transmits the resulting
interaction URI to the page server 10
via its web browser. However the interaction data is encoded by the relay
device 601, it will be understood
that the page server 10 receives interaction data, which identifies the
printed netpage 1 and at least one
position of the sensing device relative to the printed page.
Once the page server 10 has received the interaction data, it retrieves a page
description 5
corresponding to the printed netpage 1, typically using the page ID 50. The
page description 5, optionally in
combination with other sources of information (e.g. user profile, personality
of the sensing device, mode of
the sensing device, and document content), enables the page server to
interpret the interaction data. In the
case of contextual searching, the page server 10 identifies a search term
using the interaction data and the
page description 5. A request is formed from the search term and interpreted
by the page server 10. The
request may comprise, for example, keywords and/or context data which assist
in interpretation of the
keywords. The page server 10 may interpret the request by accessing web
services 200, such as keyword
search engines, via the internet. Alternatively, or additionally, the page
server 10 may have local web
resources for interpreting the request.
Once the page server 10 has interpreted the request, it then constructs a
webpage to send back to
the user's relay device 601. The webpage is constructed using, for example,
search results generated by the
web services 200 blended with information provided by local web resources. The
resultant webpage is
transmitted back to the web browser running on the user's relay device 601,
which typically displays the
webpage. If the relay device 601 is a netpage printer, the webpage may be
printed out.
Referring to Figure 1, an alternative system architecture may be used, whereby
the relay device


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601 obtains the webpage via a two-step retrieval process. Interaction data is
sent from the sensing device 101
to the relay device 601 in the usual way. The relay device then sends the
interaction data to the page server
for interpretation with reference to the relevant page description 5. The page
server 10 forms a request by
identifying a target URI, and/or search terms and, optionally, context data.
However, rather than the page
5 server 10 interpreting the request, it typically encodes the request into a
URI and sends this request URI back
to the user's relay device 601. The web browser running on the relay device
601 then sends the request URI
to a netpage web server 201, which interprets the request. The netpage web
server 201 may interact with
local web resources and external web services 200 to interpret the request and
construct a webpage. Once the
webpage has been constructed by the netpage web server 201, it is transmitted
to the web browser running
10 on the user's relay device 601, which typically displays the webpage.
Referring to Figure 1, a further alternative system architecture may be used
whereby the relay
device 601 also obtains the webpage via a two-step process, but where both
steps are mediated by the web
browser. As in the architecture depicted in Figure 39, the relay device 601
encodes the interaction data in a
URI and transmits it to the netpage page server 10 via its web browser. As in
the architecture depicted in
Figure 40, the page server returns a corresponding request URI to the relay
device 601, but in the form of an
HTTP redirect response that redirects the web browser to a different web site -
i.e. as identified by the
request URI embedded in the redirect response. The web browser then uses the
request URI to obtain the
corresponding webpage in the same way as described in relation to Figure 40.
In any of the architectures described above, where the interaction data
identifies a third-party
webpage rather than a request for a blended webpage directed at the netpage
web server 201, the request URI
simply identifies that third-party webpage.
Any reference to a webpage should be taken to include any web or internet
resource or content,
such as a remote application with a web interface, a script (e.g. JavaScript),
a document (e.g. Microsoft
Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft XPS, or Adobe PDF), an animation (e.g.
Macromedia Flash), a
video clip, an audio clip, whether interacted with remotely, streamed, or
downloaded in its entirety, and
whether supported natively by a web browser or via a plugin.

9.2 INTERACTION INTERPRETATION
In either of the system architectures described above in Figures 41A and 41B,
the page server 10
receives interaction data from the relay device 601 and must determine what
action is required. In the case of
keyword searching (and contextual searching), the page server 10 forms a
request using search terms
identified from the page description. In the case of hyperlinking, the page
server merely identifies a
corresponding hyperlink URI and either returns this URI to the user's web
browser or retrieves a
corresponding webpage and sends the webpage directly to the user's relay
device 601.

9.2.1 INTERACTIONS OR STOKES
An interaction with a printed netpage 1 made with a sensing device 101 may
alternatively be called
a stroke. A stroke usually consists of the following information:
= A nage identifier that indicates the page and document with which the user
is interacting.


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= One or more (x,y) positions over which the sensing device passed during the
stroke.
= The state of any buttons on the sensing device during the stroke.
Alternatively a stroke may be retrieved via a scan of a conventional bar code,
in which case, the
stroke will not contain (x,y) position data, but the page identifier will
identify the scanned product code.
Very basic sensing devices may only be capable of recording a single (x,y)
position for each
stroke. Such devices are called clickers, as opposed to pointers which are
devices capable of producing a
sequence of positions. Much netpage functionality can be delivered via a
clicker device, and enables a user
to click anywhere resulting is something useful happening (e.g. hyperlinking
or contextual searching). For
example, in one mode, the page server 10 determines whether a user has clicked
on a hyperlink element on
the printed netpage. If the user has clicked within a zone of a hyperlink
element, the page server identifies a
corresponding hyperlink URI, thereby enabling the corresponding webpage to be
retrieved and displayed on
the user's relay device 601. However, if the page server 10 determines that
the user has clicked outside the
zone of a hyperlink, it may initiate keyword and/or contextual searching by
identifying a search term from
the page description and forming a request, as discussed in further detail
herein. In this way, the user will
receive a useful piece of information no matter where he clicks on the printed
netpage 1.
Thus, strokes may be simple clicks which consist of a single (x,y) coordinate
position on a page, or
(for a pointer device) consist of a small number of such position samples all
localized within a small region
on a page. Pointers can also be used to generate longer strokes which consist
of a sequence of (x,y)
coordinates on a page not confined to a small region. Such strokes may be
further classified as being lines,
swipes, lassos, etc., and the act of interpreting a stroke in this way is
called gesture recognition, where click,
swipe, lasso, etc. are examples of gestures.
Figure 42A shows an example of a click gesture to indicate one word of text.
Figure 42B shows a
swipe or underline gesture to indicate three words of text. Figure 38 shows a
lasso gesture to indicate two
words of text.
The significance of gestures is that a stroke processing system, typically the
page server 10, can take
a stroke's gesture into account when determining a desired behavior.

9.2.2 STROKE INTERPRETATION AND BEHAVIORS
Stroke interpretation takes into account the following information in order to
determine
the intended meaning of a stroke:
= The stroke details as described earlier. As mentioned, this includes
interpreting the
stroke's gesture. For example, did the user click, or did they perform a lasso
gesture?
= The document contents (i.e. visual layout) at the location indicated by the
stroke.
= Interactivity markup associated with the location within the document
indicated by the
stroke (see Section 9.3).
= The type of the device, and any current device configuration.

Stroke interpretation takes place under the control of a stroke interpreter
202 as shown in Figure 43.
A stroke interpreter 202 receives a stroke and determines what to do with it.
A stroke interpreter may either


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be a stroke router 203 or a behavior 204. A stroke router 203 maintains a set
of references to other stroke
interpreters and passes each stroke received on to one of those stroke
interpreters based on details of the
stroke received. A stroke router 203 may thereby be viewed as a non-leaf node
within the stroke processing
graph. Behaviors 204 are the leaves of that graph which perform concrete (i.e.
non-routing) actions based on
the stroke received. Many useful behaviors can be conceived. Table 3 provides
some examples.
Behavior Description
Show URI This behavior looks for the uppermost URI (in terms of layering of
interactivity
markup) and presents that URI in the user's web browser.
Basic Text Search Interprets gestures as indicating a zone within the document
to examine for text.
Any discovered text is then sent to a 3rd party search provider (e.g. Google,
Yahoo, answers.com, etc) and the results displayed in a web browser.
Different gestures can be used to indicate different amounts of text to be
queried.
For example, a click gesture generally indicates a single word, while a swipe
or
lasso gesture can be used to select multiple words.
Contextual Text This behavior performs a text search as in "Basic Text
Search", but it endeavors
Search to improve the results obtained by taking into account the context
around the
selected text. This context can include both the surrounding text in the
document's visual layout or can make use of interactivity markup keywords
located at or near the location of the triggering stroke.
Content Extraction This behavior interprets gestures as indicating a zone
within the document. That
zone is then copied out of the document (extracted) to allow it, for example,
to be
pasted into a desktop application, or emailed to a friend.
Table 3

Still referring to Figure 43, stroke routers 203 can be further sub divided
into device personalities
205, gesture based routers 206, document based routers 207, and sequential
routers 208.
A device personality 205 is a button based router as shown in Figure 44. It
uses details of the state
of device buttons for a stroke to determine the stroke interpreter to which
the stroke should be routed. That
is, when a stroke is received by netpage system, the button state indicated
by the stroke is used to route the stroke. Thus different buttons 209 on a
sensing device 101 can be used to
trigger arbitrarily different behaviors 210 from the netpage system. Figure 45
provides an example consisting
of four sensing devices. The personality 205 assigned to each device 101
defines which behavior 210 to use
when strokes are received for that device while a particular button is
pressed. The current personality for a
device can be changed dynamically, for example based on user preference.
A gesture based router 206 determines the target stroke interpreter by taking
into account the
gesture that the stroke represents. Using gesture recognition allows for
multiple behaviors to be supported
even for devices with a single button. An example is shown in Figure 46 in
which a gesture based router 206
is defined which uses the "Show URI" behavior for clicks, "Text Search"
behavior for swipes, and a


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"Content Extraction" behavior for lassos. Such gesture based behaviors can
also be included in multi-button
personalities as shown in Figure 47.
A document based router 207 determines the target stroke interpreter by taking
into account details
of the document (potentially both visual layout and interactivity markup), and
location within the document,
5 on which the stroke was made. Examples of both gesture and document based
routers are provided in Section
9.4.
A sequential router 208 maintains an ordered list of stroke interpreters and
each stroke
interpreter is consulted in turn to see whether it can handle the stroke. As
an example, the "Show URI"
behavior can be combined with the "Text Search" behavior to produce a behavior
which shows a URI if one
10 is present at the location of a stroke, but falls back to performing a text
search otherwise.

9.3 INTERACTIVITY MARKUP
The netpage system stores details of each document's visual layout, and
optionally stores additional
interactivity markup for each document. Typically, this information is stored
in the page description 5. The
15 markup consists of data associated with zones 58 within the document in
question, either directly, or
indirectly via structural markup. A zone 58 is defined as predetermined area
within a document. Zones 58
can be layered such that one zone is consider to be in front of another.
The term "interactivity markup" is used in the present description to refer to
any document markup
available for interpretation by behaviors. This includes general purpose
semantic markup (some of which
20 may use third party standards such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative),
as well as netpage specific
markup which is only understood by stroke interpreters within the netpage
system.
Markup can be authored manually, although the netpage system also
automatically generates
markup for a document upon reception of that document. Automated markup is
discussed in Section 9.3.1.
In its most general form, interactivity markup is simply data (typically text)
associated with zones
25 58 within a document 836. Markup zones can be layered such that one zone is
considered to be in front of
another. As already stated, some of the markup associated with a document is
based on the Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative (DCMI) element set as described herein. This provides
compatibility with existing (and
future) third party document analysis tools. Additional netpage specific
markup can also be specified, the
object model for which is described herein.
30 All markup (both DCMI and netpage specific) is available to the various
stroke interpreters 202 in
order to allow them to determine the user's intent upon reception of a stroke
from a sensing device 101. In
general, the interpretation of the interactivity markup within each zone 58 is
not defined within the markup
itself. Instead the interpretation is left to individual stroke interpreters.
In fact, different stroke interpreters
may interpret the same markup in different ways and may also completely ignore
various pieces of markup.
35 Interactivity markup could potentially be specified in any number of
different formats. XML
provides a grammar with a suitable level of expressiveness, and is ubiquitous
within the computing domain.
For the sake of exposition XML is used in the present description to represent
markup examples. The XML
schema is not formally defined, but the semantics should be sufficiently
discernible from the surrounding
text descriptions.


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9.3.1 AUTOMATIC MARKUP CREATION
Much document markup can be determined via automated processing of the visual
layout of
documents submitted to the netpage system. Examples of markup elements that
can be determined
automatically are structural/textual markup elements such as:
=<wo rd> elements for identifying each word within the document,
=<term> elements for identifying multi-word terms.
=<paragraph>, <section>, and <article> elements for identifying structure
within
the document.
More details regarding approaches to automated textual markup are described
herein.
Automated processing can also discover the presence of textual URIs in the
document's
visual layout and produce corresponding <URI> markup elements.
Some behaviors can perform much or all of their activities by using automated
markup
alone.
9.4 STANDARD STROKE INTERPRETERS
This section presents the standard netpage stroke interpreters 202 (mostly
behaviors) along with a
description of the way in which their actions correspond to the strokes
received and
the interactivity markup present in the underlying document.
Each interaction consists of an initiating stroke and a resultant response
from a behavior. For each
initiating stroke, all markup that is determined to lie underneath the stroke
is
called the candidate markup set and most, but not all, stroke interpreters
limit their considerations to markup
that belongs to the candidate markup set. Candidate markup is ordered
according to the layering present in
the markup with uppermost markup generally having precedence over underlying
markup. In addition,
candidate markup retains the location information for each element. That can
be used, for example, to
determine the intended ordering between two <word> elements.

9.4.1 "SHOW URI" BEHAVIOR
The "Show URI" behavior looks for the uppermost <URI> markup element (i.e. a
link 844, as
described in Section 9.7.1) in the candidate markup and presents that URI on
the user's machine (typically
inside the user's web browser). All other markup elements are ignored (except
in the case of parameterized
URI specifications as discussed later).
The "Show URI" behavior provides the basis for hyperlinks to be authored into
documents. For
example, if the behavior is mapped to the click gesture for button 1, then
clicking with button 1 in an area of
a page with the following associated <URI> markup:

<URI value="www.nytimes.com" />

causes the New York Times home page to be displayed in the user's web browser.


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The "Show URI" behavior supports parameterized URI specifications such as that
shown below:

<URI value="www.wikipedia.org/wiki/%%word%%" />

The % oword o % string is a place-holder which is replaced with a
corresponding string by the behavior before
the URI is interpreted or transmitted to the user's machine. In the case of
the o oword o o place-holder, it is
replaced with the value of the uppermost <word> markup element in the
candidate markup set. Note that
<word> elements are generally created automatically (see Section 9.3.1) and
correspond to the words
discovered in the underlying document's visual layout. An example is shown in
Figure 48. The <URI>
element is associated with the entire page, while each word in the text has
been assigned a <word> element
(only a few of which are shown in the Figure 48). Thus, if a stroke is routed
to the "Show URI" behavior and
falls on top of a word then that word will be displayed in Wikipedia.
If the user interacts with a location on the page that does not contain a
<word> element,then the
"Show URI" behavior will fail to create the destination URI (since the o oword
o o place-holder cannot be
replaced) and it will not pass the (incomplete) URI to the user. That is,
interacting on the background of the
page under the "Show URI" behavior will result in no action taking place,
which is likely what the user
would expect in this case.

9.4.2 SEARCH BEHAVIORS
Netpage provides a number of behaviors that can be collectively described as
"search" behaviors
since their purpose is to locate additional information about items that the
user interacts with on the printed
page.

9.4.2.1 "WORD SEARCH" BEHAVIOR
The "Word Search" behavior looks for the uppermost <word> markup element(s) in
the candidate
markup set and creates and invokes a corresponding URI which includes that
word or sequence of words.
The actual URI used by the "Word Search" behavior is a configurable setting
(e.g. per user, per
publisher, per publication, etc.). Generally the URI should refer to a search
engine or other word lookup web
site. For example, the following lists some URIs that would be appropriate for
the "Word Search" behavior:
http://www.google.com/search?q=oowordsoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=oowordsoo
http://www.answers.com/%%words%%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/oowordsoo
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=oowordsoo

The URIs use the same parameterized URI format as described in Section 9.4.1,
although, unlike
the example in Section 9.4.1, generally the configuration of the URI to be
used by the "Word Search"
behavior would not be placed in document markup. More likely is for the URI to
be dynamically


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configurable to allow, for example, a user to change their preference of "Word
Search" engine across all of
their documents with a single action.
While the "Word Search" engine would generally be configured outside of
documents, it is still
possible to configure aspects of the engine within documents for certain
purposes. As an example, a
pharmaceutical company "company X" may publish a two page advertisement in a
magazine, the second
page consisting of fine print regarding the product being advertised. On that
second page, the company may
choose to override the "Word Search" URI so that technical words are defined
by the company, rather than
leaving definitions to the vagaries of the user's preferred engine. That can
be achieved by associating a
<search-uri> markup element (i.e. a search template term with a search
template URI 1136, as described
in Section 9.7.2) with the page. For example:

<search-uri value="http://www.company-x.search/search?q=%%words%%" />
During stroke processing, if the "Word Search" behavior discovers a<search-
uri> element in
the candidate markup set, then it uses that URI in preference to the default
URI. The <search-uri>
element thus provides a means to provide a restricted domain search facility.
Another use case in which <search-uri> might be used is in an advertisement
for a search
engine company. For example, an advertisement for answers.com might override
<search-uri> so that
all searches initiated from the advertisement are routed to answers.com:
<search-uri value="http://www.answers.com/%%words%%" />

<search-uri> hard codes a URI into the markup of a document. That may be
undesirable since the exact
URI used may need to change after the document is published. For example,
suppose the format of
answers.com search URIs changes. In that case, the advertiser would like to
change the URI to, for example:
<search-uri value="http://www.answers.com?q=%%words%%" />

While changing the markup associated with a document is possible (since the
markup is stored
online) it is somewhat inconvenient to do so. As an alternative, the "Word
Search" behavior supports the
concept of pre-defined engines via the <search-engine> element (i.e. a search
engine term with a search
engine identifier 1137, as described in Section 9.7.2):

<search-engine value="answers.com" />
which can be used to override the search engine used without having to define
the actual URI within the
markup. The "Word Search" behavior maintains a (likely growing) list of known
search engines, and for
each engine stores the corresponding (parameterized) URI.


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Returning to the pharmaceutical example, suppose company X does not have its
own search facility,
but would like to be able to restrict searches (performed by third party
engines) to within a particular internet
domain (e.g. www.company-x.com). The <search-domain> element (i.e. a search
domain term with a
search domain 1138, as described in Section 9.7.2) can be used to instruct the
"Word Search" behavior to
instruct search engines to restrict results to those that lie within the
specified domain. For example:

<search-domain value="www.company-x.com" />

As an example, if the above element is found in the candidate markup set, and
the default search
engine is Google, then clicking on <word value="medicine" /> would result in
the following URI
being invoked:

http://www.google.com/search?q=medicine+site:www.company-x.com
Some search engines will not be capable of supporting restricted domain
searching. In the case that
the default engine is such an engine, then the "Word Search" behavior could
possibly fall back on using an
engine that does support restricted domain searching. As such a user's
configuration might actually consist
of an ordered list of preferred engines. The "Word Search" behavior would then
select the most preferred
engine that is capable of performing the requested search.
As the "Word Search" behavior can act on multiple words, it is convenient to
map it to a gesture
that allows multiple words to be selected. A swipe gesture, for example.
Figure 46 provided an example of a
single button personality where the swipe gesture was mapped to a search
behavior. Figure 49 provided an
example of a multi button personality in which, for one button, both the click
and swipe gestures were
mapped to a search behavior.
The quality of results retrieved via a text search can be enhanced by taking
into account the
surrounding context from the document from which the search is initiated. The
"Word Search" behavior can
perform such contextual searches and this is described in more detail below.

9.4.2.2 "TEXT SEARCH" BEHAVIOR
The "Text Search" behavior is a generalization of the "Word Search" behavior
to support searching
of multi-word terms in addition to basic word(s) searching. The "Text Search"
behavior looks for the same
elements as the "Word Search" behavior including the various <search-.../>
elements which customize
the behavior's actions. In addition, the "Text
Search" behavior looks for <term> elements. Figure 49 provides an example
where some text has been
marked up with both <word> and <term> elements. Now suppose a personality has
been configured such
that the click gesture is mapped to the "Text Search" behavior. In that case,
clicking anywhere on "planet" or
"mercury" will cause the term "planet mercury" to be added to the candidate
markup set. The "Text Search"
behavior will then use that term in preference to either word, thereby
resulting in better search results (i.e.
better than a result obtained from searching for the word "mercury" alone.
Such a result would likely contain


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entries for the chemical element mercury, as well as entries for companies,
product etc. with the name
"Mercury").
<term> elements can be manually inserted into document markup, but can also be
automatically discovered as mentioned in Section 9.3.1.
5
9.4.2.3 "PRODUCT SEARCH" BEHAVIOR
The "Product Search" behavior looks for <product> elements (i.e. a concept
term 1148 that
specifies a concept 1149 which is a product concept, as described in Section
9.7.2) and creates and invokes a
corresponding product search URI. <product> elements are often associated with
advertisements, but may
10 also appear in non-advertising content, for example a book review in a
magazine may contain a picture of the
book and a <product> element associated with that picture. <product> elements
can refer to products in
various ways as described herein (e.g. EAN/UPC codes, ISBN/ISSN numbers, or
product names).
As with text searches, the actual URI used for a product search is
configurable, and
overridable. Examples of suitable URIs are:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=ooproductoo
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle=ooproductoo
9.4.2.4 "TEXT AND PRODUCT SEARCH" ROUTER
The "Text and Product Search" router is a document based router which combines
text search and
product search functionality by invoking the "Text Search" or "Product Search"
behavior depending on
which elements are present in the markup. Product markup takes precedence over
textual (i.e. <word> and
<term>) markup. An example is shown in Figure 50 in which button 2 is routed
via "Text and Product
Search" which is a document based router that routes strokes to the "Product
Search" behavior if a
<product> element is present in the candidate markup set, but otherwise routes
strokes to the "Text
Search" behavior.

9.4.2.5 USING GESTURES TO COMBINE TEXT AND PRODUCT SEARCHES
Another way to combine text and product search is to use gestures to
disambiguate situations where both
product and textual markup is available. An example is shown in Figure 51. A
two button sensing device is
shown. Button 1 always invokes the "Show URI" behavior regardless of gesture.
Button 2 is the "search"
button. Clicks invoke the "Text and Product Search" behavior meaning that if
both textual and product
markup is available, a product search will be invoked in preference to a text
search. The swipe gesture, on
the other hand, is mapped directly to the "Text Search" behavior. Thus in
cases where the user clicks with
the search button on some text and unexpectedly invokes a product search URI,
they can invoke the intended
text search by swiping rather than clicking.


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9.4.3 CONTENT EXTRACTION BEHAVIOR
The "Content Extraction" behavior interprets gestures as indicating an area
within the document.
That area is then copied (extracted) from the document and made available to
the user, to allow it, for
example, to be pasted into a desktop application, or emailed to a friend. This
is typically achieved by placing
the content into the user's clipboard, although details can vary depending on
which output device the user is
using to receive responses from the netpage system. This type of behavior was
described in detail in Section
8 above.
Extracted content can include both the visual layout and the document markup
(possibly
converted to some standard format such as html). The retention of
interactivity markup allows for the content
to be interacted with even though it is no longer confined to a printed
surface. The advantage of this is that it
provides an additional source of netpage interactions (e.g. clicks), which
provides publishers with additional
value.

9.4.4 "NETPAGE PORTAL" BEHAVIOR
As described above, a significant use case for the sensing device 101 is
linking printed magazine
(for example) editorial content to a portal style web application which
presents:
= More extensive information relating to the print article. e.g. additional
photos, related video, etc.
= Latest news items related to the principal subject matter of the article.
= Advertisements related to the content of the article, but also potentially
related to the location within the
article with which the user interacted.

An example page layout is shown in Figure 52. The web page corresponding to
the URI associated
with the article is displayed. The web page is framed so that it can be
displayed alongside relevant news and
ads.
The "Netpage Portal" behavior supports this use case. It is a specialization
of the more basic "Show
URI" behavior in that, like "Show URI", it looks for the uppermost <URI>
markup element in the candidate
markup set. Unlike "Show URI", the "Netpage Portal" behavior does not simply
invoke the URI. Instead, a
separate URI is created and invoked which typically includes the <URI> element
as a parameter. The actual
URI used by the portal can be configured both within the netpage system (e.g.
system wide, per publisher,
per publication, etc.) and within document markup. The URI is generally a
parameterized URI, minimally
with a place holder which allows for the current <URI> markup element to be
inserted. For example:
http://www.my-portal.com/show?uri=oourioo

% ouri % % being a standard parameter supported by the netpage URI
parameterization facility as introduced
in Section 9.4.1. The portal template URI can be specified via a portal
specification 1132, as described in
Section 9.7.2.


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Portal applications can request that additional information be provided via
specification of a more
sophisticated URI with place holders for the required information. All of the
information specified by the
resource description type and object model described below is available.
In summary, the details of the actual web content displayed by a portal
application are
beyond the responsibilities of the "Netpage Portal" behavior itself, which is
only responsible for creating and
invoking the required URI. The next section provides an example of how a
portal application might work.
9.4.4.1 NETPAGE PORTAL WEB APPLICATION
This briefly describes an example portal application that supports the use
case
shown in Figure 52. The application is invoked via URIs which have been
generated by the "Netpage
Portal" behavior described in Section 9.4.4. The application makes use of the
following document markup information:
= <URI>
= subject descriptions
= ad search spec terms (see Object Model below)

So, an example parameterized URI (template URI) for the portal app might look
something like:

http://www.netpage-portal.com/article?uri=oourioo&subject=oosubjectoo&ad-
subjects=ooad-search-specsoo

Repeating, each place holder used above is automatically replaced by the
"Netpage Portal" behavior
with an encoded form of the corresponding document markup information. For the
sake of simplicity, this
discussion uses the XML markup annotation to refer to such information as if
the portal application had
direct access to the candidate markup set.
Returning to the portal application, it needs to determine which news and ad
content to
display. News content is driven by looking for subject descriptions within the
candidate markup and
automatically fetching latest news stories related to the subject. A subject
description consists of a set of
weighted terms each of which may be a simple keyword or may be a concept in an
associated ontology.
Subject descriptions are described in detail in Section 9.7.2. As an example,
an article may have the
following subject description:

<subject>
<keyword value="Paris Hilton" weight="1.0" />
<keyword value="Nicole Richie" weight="0.9" />
<keyword value="argument" weight="0.5" />
<keyword value="Jon Murray" weight="0.2" />
<keyword value="Hollywood" weight="0.1" />
<keyword value="Dan Tana" weight="0.1" />


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</subject>

The portal application uses the subject description to determine the most
appropriate news stories to
present. In the case of the example, the behavior may limit the news stories
to those related to Paris Hilton
and Nicole Richie since the other subject terms have relatively small
weightings. As an example, the
following URI might be constructed and invoked in order to source news from
the Google news service.
http://news.google.com/news?q=o22paris+hiltono22+o22nicole+richieo22&outp
ut=rss
The actual choice of source of news stories is a decision that is left to the
portal
application.
Ad selection is driven in a similar way to news story selection, except that
it typically makes use of
separate subject descriptions specifically specified as being associated with
the sourcing of advertisements.
These are referred to as "ad search spec terms" in the Object Model described
below. However, although ad
search might be confined to the ad subject description from the "ad search
spec terms", it may also use
subject descriptions from the document.
In cases where the portal application does not recognize the received <URI>
element as one of its
own, the user's web browser is simply redirected to that URI. That is,
interacting with foreign (non-portal
hosted) URIs simply results in that URI being shown in the user's web browser.
If all portal apps provide
such forwarding behavior, then that allows for the "Netpage Portal" behavior
to be used as a substitute for
the "Show URI" behavior in all cases.
Alternatively, the portal can frame any web page with news, ads, etc., e.g.
under the control of a
user preference.
9.4.5 CURSOR CONTROL BEHAVIOR
Netpage provides a cursor control behavior where movement of the sensing
device 101 is converted
into a stream of cursor control commands that are sent to the user interface
system controlling the user's
display device, thereby to control movement of a cursor displayed on the
display device. The display device
may be integrated into or be associated with the relay device 601, or it may
be separate. In many graphical
user interface systems (GUIs) cursor control commands are referred to as mouse
events since they are
commonly generated by mouse devices.
When the cursor control behaviour is in effect, cursor control events may be
generated in the page
server 10 and transmitted to the user's display device. When the display
device is integrated into or
associated with the relay device 601, cursor control events may alternatively
be generated in the relay device
601. In this case the relay device 601 and possibly the sensing device 101
must be aware of when the cursor
control mode is in effect.
The cursor control behaviour may be selected in any of the usual ways,
including by selecting a
physical mode of the sensing device (e.g. via a mode switch or a momentary
switch), or by interacting with


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the zone of a cursor control region of a physical surface, either defined in a
page description or via the tags
themselves, or by selecting a device personality that includes a cursor
control behaviour.
Positions generated by a netpage sensing device are intrinsically absolute.
This allows such
positions to be trivially converted into absolute cursor control commands. The
extent of the physical surface
with which the sensing device is interacting is ideally mapped to the extent
of the display device for the
purposes of translating sensing device positions into cursor control commands.
Cursor control commands
commonly specify changes in position rather than absolute positions - i.e.
they are relative. Absolute
positions generated by a netpage sensing device are trivially converted into
relative cursor control
commands.
To support on-screen interactions such as clicking on on-screen buttons and
hyperlinks and
dragging on-screen objects, it is also useful to emulate one or more of the
buttons that appear on a mouse, or
similarly, the pen down sensing capability of a graphics tablet. These can be
emulated via one or more
physical mode selectors in the sensing device. If the cursor control behaviour
is selected via a physical mode
of the sensing device, then a second physical mode selector can be used to
signal pen down events. For
example, if the sensing device has both a momentary finger switch and a nib
switch, then the finger switch
can be used to select the cursor control behaviour, and the nib switch can be
used to signal pen down. If the
cursor control behaviour is selected via a different mechanism, such as the
surface itself or a device
personality, then a single physical mode selector can be used to signal pen
down events, such as a
momentary finger switch or a nib switch.
9.4.6 HANDWRITING CAPTURE BEHAVIOR
Netpage provides a handwriting capture behavior where strokes received from
the sensing device
101 are interpreted as handwritten annotations or as handwritten form input.
The sensing device 101, when
assigned a handwriting capture behaviour, is typically pen-like, i.e. with a
marking nib coupled to a nib
switch or force sensor. However, any motion-sensing netpage sensing device can
potentially be assigned a
handwriting capture behaviour.
Several variants of the handwriting capture behavior are possible. A pure
annotation behavior
always captures handwriting as passive annotations, irrespective of the
content of the page description 5. A
form-filling behavior is a superset of the annotation behaviour. It captures
form input in form fields 845 and
annotations elsewhere. A pen behavior is a superset of the form-filling
behavior. It allows hyperlinks to be
followed where links 844 are present, but captures form input and annotations
elsewhere.
When a pen-like sensing device 101 has a nib switch or force sensor, but no
other physical mode
selector, then it is useful to assign it the pen behaviour by default. If it
has an additional mode selector, such
as a momentary finger switch, then it is possible to assign the annotation
behavior or the form-filling
behavior to the nib switch, and assign the hyperlinking behavior (or similar)
to the finger switch.
If the sensing device 101 allows the insertion of a cartridge with either a
marking nib 119 or a non-
marking nib 121, or allows the extension of one of several cartridges (as
described in Section 7.1), then the
type of cartridge present (or extended), as indicated by the nib ID
transmitted by the sensing device 101 (in a
nib change raw stroke component 175), constitutes a useful mode selector. For
example, the pen behavior,


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form-filling behavior, or annotation behavior can be assigned to the marking
nib 119, and the hyperlinking
("show URI") behavior (or similar) can be assigned to the non-marking nib 121.
The absence of an extended nib (i.e. because it is in a retracted state or
physically absent) also
constitutes a useful mode selector. Again, if the sensing device has an
additional mode selector, such as a
5 momentary finger switch, then it is possible to assign the hyperlinking
behavior (or similar) to the finger
switch precisely when the cartridge is retracted or absent, and to assign a
different behaviour to the finger
switch, such as a content extraction behavior (or similar), when the cartridge
is extended (and potentially
also in combination with the nib being depressed).

10 9.5 DEPLOYMENT PHASES FOR ENHANCED NETPAGE FUNCTIONALITY
It is possible to envisage a phased deployment of the enhanced netpage
functionality described
above, as shown in Table 4. The phase names are preceded by either the letter
`A' or `D' where `A' refers to
a process that uses Analog printing (e.g. offset printing), while `D' refers
to a process that uses Digital
printing (e.g. MemjetTm) whether it be digital printing as replacement for
offset printing (phase D- 1 and D-2)
15 or desktop printing (phase D-3).
Phase A-1 provides basic netpage functionality without requiring any
modifications to existing
publishing processes. As such, it represents a convenient first step in
adopting netpage. Each subsequent
phase provides additional netpage functionality, but also requires additional
modifications to the publishing
process as described in Table 4.
Phase Functionality Supported Process Modification
Phase A-1 - Text Search Automated post processing of
- Printed URIs documents required. No
- Content Extraction modification to standard
publishing process required.
Phase A-2 All of phase A-1 plus: Manual post processing of
- Hyperlinks with documents required in order
hidded (i.e. not to associate hyperlinks (and
printed URIs) optionally keywords) with
- Keyword enhanced regions within documents.
hyperlinks
- Product discovery
Phase A-3 Highly interactive documents. Authoring of document
That is, documents designed interactivity integrated with
from the ground up to be overall authoring process.
richly interactive.
Phase D-1 Advertisement (and content) Adoption of digital printing.
localization and continuous
advertisement splitting.


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Phase D-2 All of phase D-1 plus Subscriber addressing at time
personalized advertisements of printing.
and content. Targeting of advertisements
based on models of individual
subscribers (e.g. minimally
subscriber's zip code).
Phase D-3 Fully customized content Individual users print out
delivered to individual users documents on demand on
on demand. desktop printers (see cross-
referenced US Patent
Applications cited above)
Table 4

9.5.1 EXISTING PUBLISHING PROCESS
This section very briefly presents the existing publishing model for offset
printed documents.
Subsequent sections then present the various netpage deployment phases in
terms of changes required to
existing processes.
Figure 53 provides a very high level view of the existing publishing model for
offset printed
documents. An authoring step is used to produce a visual layout for the
document. That visual layout is then
provided to an offset printing process which produces the individual physical
printouts.
An offset printer consists of a pipeline of printing units. Each unit prints
in a single color on one
side of the paper passing through the unit. Thus, in order to print double
sided in 4 colors (C, M, Y, K) a
total of 8 units is required. Further units are required if any page layouts
demand varnish or spot colors.
Figure 53 does not cover complications regarding the fact that existing
magazine publishing
processes (for example) will often produce multiple different copies of the
same edition of a magazine. This
is done to allow magazine instances to be tailored to specific target markets.
For example different versions
of a magazine may be produced for different regions allowing both editorial
and advertising content to be
tailored to that region. In order to maintain printer throughput, such
customizing of magazine instances is
often performed as a post printing collation step. Typically documents such as
magazines are printed on large
sheets containing 8 sheets of magazine content..
9.5.2 PHASE A-1
Figure 54 shows the required changes to the standard publishing model in order
to support phase A-
1 netpage functionality. While the changes may look significant it is
important to realize that most of the
work is performed automatically by the netpage system without the need for
action from the publisher. The
only changes in the Figure 54 that are visible to the publisher are:
= The finished document (e.g. PDF) must be submitted to the netpage service,
and
= The invisible tag pattern generated for each page by the netpage system must
be incorporated into the offset
printing process as a separate infrared ink layer.


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The netpage system automatically takes care of the process of preparing a
document for
interactive use. As shown in the Figure 54, the main services provided by the
netpage system for phase A-1
are:
= Archiving of the document's visual layout. This allows the service to
support content extraction and text
search operations.
= The allocation of unique page identifiers to each page within the source
document and the generation of a
corresponding document which contains a full page netpage infrared tag pattern
corresponding to each page
in the source document. Each such page encodes the unique page identifier and
an (x,y) coordinate grid
within the tag pattern.
= Automated detection of printed URIs in the source document and creation of
corresponding interactivity
markup to allow pointer devices to interact with those URIs.

The most significant change that is visible to the publisher/printer is
actually not shown in Figure
54. That is that the printing process requires the addition of two printing
units (assuming double sided
printing) for printing the infrared tag layer. Further, the ink used in other
units must use an ink formulation
that does not interfere with the infrared layer. That generally means that the
black ink must be specially
selected to be infrared transparent.

9.5.3 PHASE A-2
In Phase A-2 (see Figure 55) the publishing process is augmented with a stage
in which the
completed artwork is enhanced by the manual specification of interactivity
markup to be associated with
zones within the document. A common example is that a URI can be associated
with a zone within a page.
Zones are commonly rectangular, but may take any shape. The interactivity
markup is archived by the
netpage service and is then available to the service's interaction
interpretation processing as already
described above. For example, a click within a zone with an associated URI may
be interpreted as a request
to display the URI in the user's web browser.
A specialized tool may be used for allowing publishers to perform the manual
document post
processing. The graphical tool will present the visual layout of the document
and allow the user to drag out
zones and associate interactivity markup with them. It is also conceivable
that tools such as Adobe Acrobat
could be used for the purpose.
Automated A-1 style post processing of the document is included in phase A-2,
and all subsequent
phases. Phase A-1 provides automated functionality that is useful for all
phases.

9.5.4 PHASE A-3
Figure 56 shows the phase A-3 publishing process. In this phase the visual
layout authoring stage
(stage 1) of earlier phases has been replaced by a stage in which both the
document's visual layout and
interactivity are defined together. This stage allows for extensive
interactivity to be authored into the


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document, similar to the production of static web content where the visual
layout and hyperlinks are
generally authored at the same time.
Automated phase A-1 and manual phase A-2 style post processing of the document
is still possible
for phase A-3 and may be particularly useful during a transitional period to
phase A-3 in which only parts of
a document may contain phase A-3 style explicitly created interactivity.

9.5.5 PHASE D-1
Phase D-1 requires the introduction of digital printing as a replacement for
traditional offset
printing. That allows for the visual layout and associated netpage
interactivity of individual printed instances
of a document to differ from other printed instances of that same document. In
phase D-1, that flexibility is
used to allow printed documents to vary either continuously (i.e. semi-
randomly) or by region or both. The
first is generally used for advertising and allows the publisher to sell
different percentages of a certain
advertisement space to different advertisers, while the second allows for
content and advertisements to vary
geographically.
The advantages of such targeted content and advertisements are twofold.
Firstly, it is likely to
encourage more reading and more netpage activity per user. Secondly, it allows
the advertising space to be
sold more efficiently and allows for arbitrary division of the advertising
space including opening up printed
advertising to smaller advertisers. Both advantages lead to a more valuable
advertising space for the
publisher.
Figure 57 provides some details of how such document publishing works. It uses
the specific
example of targeted advertising being inserted into otherwise identical
documents. The initial authoring
process produces a template document that contains the visual layout and
interactivity markup for all non-
variable parts of the document. It also contains named placeholders for the
areas within the document which
are to vary per printout or group of printouts. See, for example, the
rectangular areas labelled "A" in the
Figure 57. The actual printing takes place on a large format digital printer.
In order to be able to maintain the
printing speeds required on such printers, the integration of dynamic content
actually takes place inside the
printer itself. For similar reasons, the creation of the required infrared tag
patterns also occurs within the
printer. The resultant data (visual layout, interactivity markup, and netpage
page IDs) are then communicated
to the netpage service at some stage.
The phase D-1 process results in numerous document instances which are all
unique and yet have a
large amount of layout and interactivity markup in common. Such commonality
can be leveraged to reduce
the storage and computing requirements of the overall system. For the sake of
simplicity, such sharing has
not been shown in Figure 57.

9.5.6 PHASE D-2
Phase D-2 enhances phase D-1 by adding support for personalized advertisements
and content. It
requires subscriber addressing to be performed at the time of printing and for
targeting of advertisements
(and possibly content) based on models of individual subscribers. Such
personalization can take into account
the subscriber's location (minimally zip code), subscriber demographics such
as age, sex, interests, income,


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education, and occupation, and can even include personalized content that is
only included in that specific
subscriber's document instance. An example of the latter might include a
partially pre-filled-in form for
renewing the subscriber's subscription, or a birthday greeting.
A document can consist of visual layout (and associated interactivity markup)
that is derived from a
combination of all of the previously described phases. For example, the one
printed document may have
some content which is the same for all instances (e.g. a global news story or
nationwide full page
advertisement), other parts which have been included due to regional
considerations (local news story or
advertisement for local merchant), still other content which is based on
aspects of the reader's demographics
(e.g. story or advertisement targeted at young parents), and finally some
content which is tailored specifically
to that user (e.g. subscription form as already described).

9.5.7 PHASE D-3
Phase D-3 is defined by the use of personal digital printing which allows:
= Documents to be printed on demand by the user and to be individually
tailored at that
time for that specific user.
= Providing basic (i.e. phase A-1) netpage functionality such as content
extraction, and
text search, and printed URI support, to any document printed by that user
from any
application.

9.6 CONSUMER USE CASES
With the above-described architecture in place, a number of useful functions
for the consumer can
be envisaged, depending on the type of interaction and how the system is
specifically implemented.

9.6.1 KEY TO FIGURES
Figure 43 provides a key to the use case diagrams in the following sections.
Each diagram shows a
click-through from a printed page to a web page displayed in a web browser,
and possibly click-throughs
from the web page to further web pages.
The web site optionally indicates its owner (in brackets). The absence of an
explicit owner indicates
that the web page is served by the netpage provider.
A circled "opt" indicates the presence of various options available alongside
the web page, e.g.
presented as hyperlinks or as soft keys. Some of these options may be shown
explicitly in expanded form
below the display ("option 1", "option 2", etc.).
An optional reference name in a box on the corner of the display provides a
name by which the web
page can be referred to elsewhere.
9.6.2 ADVERTISEMENT LINKING
A printed advertisement may be promoting a brand or a specific product. Its
purpose may be to
build brand awareness in the consumer, e.g. to influence future purchasing
decisions, or its purpose may be
to call the consumer to action, e.g. to engage the consumer in further
dialogue (e.g. via a phone call or a web


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site), or to actually trigger a purchase.
The advertiser normally has a web site which is identified by a URI in the ad.
In some cases the web
site is well aligned with the ad, e.g. it provides additional detail on the
product(s) described in the ad and
may facilitate purchasing by identifying merchants or supporting online
ordering. In many cases, however,
5 the web site does not assist the consumer in purchasing the product(s).
By making a printed ad interactive the netpage system can provide the
advertiser with several
benefits. It can make it much easier for the consumer to reach the brand
owner's web site, since they don't
need to manually launch a web browser and transcribe the URI. The netpage
system can measure the click-
through rate (CTR), allowing the advertiser to gauge the effectiveness of the
ad. This may be supplemented
10 with demographic information, either per transaction or in aggregate, when
the system knows such
information and is able to share it. Each click-through provides the
advertiser with an opportunity to further
engage with the consumer, and has the potential to be converted into a sale.
The CTR of a given printed ad may remain relatively low even after netpage use
becomes
commonplace. Unlike a small-format online ad, such as a sponsored link
displayed alongside Google search
15 results, a large-format print ad already achieves much of its purpose
simply by being seen. The absolute CTR
of an ad is therefore not necessarily of primary interest to the advertiser.
Instead, the advertiser may be more
interested in comparing the CTRs of different ads to help fine-tune an ad
campaign. The CTR of an ad can
also be compared with the CTR of the magazine as a whole, since this gives a
more realistic indication of the
ad's potential CTR than the number of ad impressions printed.
20 Because many brand owners are not well placed to directly support
purchasing, one of the major
services the netpage system can offer to a brand owner is to connect consumers
who click on their ad with
merchants who sell their product(s). The system therefore provide product
search functions that can identify
online merchants for products sold online, and local merchants for products
sold through stores. The netpage
system may provide product search as part of an online shopping service. The
netpage system may allow the
25 consumer to select their favourite product search (and shopping) service,
so long as it has a revenue-sharing
arrangement with that service. Product search can operate on either a product
description or a product code.
Product search and shopping is discussed in more detail elsewhere.
By providing added value to the advertiser, the advertising space is made more
valuable
and therefore provides added value to the publisher.
30 In addition, product search provides a source of revenue which is
independent of ad revenue. A
merchant may be required to pay a fee when their listing appears in search
results, or when the consumer
clicks on their listing, or when the consumer completes a purchase. Product
search revenue can be shared
between the netpage provider, the publisher, and possibly the advertiser. In
the latter case the advertiser is
effectively receiving a rebate on any ad which captures profitable click-
throughs.
35 There are several ways of linking an ad to both the brand owner's web site
and to product search:
(1) The entire ad may be linked to the brand owner's web site, but framed in
such a way that the
netpage system can provide ads and additional options, such as product search,
independently of the brand
owner. Framing is a technique where the framed web site functions as if it
were displayed alone in the web
browser, but is in fact displayed alongside other content. This option is
illustrated in Figure 44.


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(2) The brand owner's web site and product search may be framed so that they
are presented
together.
(3) The entire ad may be linked to product search, and provide a link from the
product search page
to the brand owner's web site.
(4) The brand owner's web site may be linked from just part of the ad, such as
the printed URI, and
the rest of the ad may be linked to product search. This may be preferable,
since not all web sites are friendly
to framing.
(5) A set of on-screen options may be provided that allow the consumer to
choose between the
brand owner's web site, product search, local product search, etc. This
approach is preferable when the
screen is small, such as on a mobile device, but may be useful more generally.
It is illustrated in Figure 45.
(6) The user may be allowed to specify, as a preference, how click-throughs
are routed.
(7) The user can use device controls (e.g. buttons), or gestures, to choose
between options.
9.6.3 EMBEDDED PRODUCT REFERENCES
In many cases the editorial content of a magazine will refer to specific
products. Product reviews
are an obvious example. It would be desirable to provide the consumer with the
convenience of linking from
such product references to further information online, as well as the
opportunity to make a purchase. The
netpage system should preferably also capture corresponding click-through fees
and sales commissions.
Whereas in the case of advertising netpages are obliged to link to the brand
owner's web site in
some way, in the case of product references the netpage system is free to link
directly to generic product
information, or a shopping service, or product search, i.e. the system is free
to provide linking which
maximises value to the consumer, to the publisher, and to the netpage
provider. Linking can be based on a
product code, on a product description, or a set of keywords.
Amazon provides a good example of an online shopping service which could be
linked from a
printed product reference. Amazon's collection of services, including in-depth
product info,
recommendations, ratings, samples, and shopping, serves the consumer well.
Amazon also pays sales
commissions to sites that provide sales leads. Netpages may allow the consumer
to select their favourite
shopping service, so long as the netpage provider a revenue-sharing
arrangement with that service. Linking
to shopping services may be on on a per product category basis, since
different services specialise in
different product categories.
Note that, unlike the product search functions referred to elsewhere in this
specification,
Amazon's product search is typically among different products, not among
different merchants.
As shown in Figure 44, whatever the product reference is linked to directly,
the netpage system can
frame this so ads and additional options are provided in the same way as
discussed in relation to
advertisements in the previous section.
When editorial content refers to a product of a fairly unique nature, such as
a particular
item of clothing or an accessory, it typically also identifies a particular
merchant for that product and
provides contact details and a web site URI. In such cases it is appropriate
to use that URI as a source of
online product information.


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9.6.4 PRODUCT SELF REFERENCES
Every product item encodes a machine-readable reference to its own product
class via its UPC/EAN
bar code. With RFID and HyperlabelTm tagging (see, for example, US Application
Nos. 10/409,876 filed on
April 9, 2003; and 10/815,647 filed on April 2, 2004, the contents of which
are herein incorporated by
reference), this extends to the product item's serial number via the item's
EPC. To distinguish between a self
reference and general interactivity on a HyperlabelTM tagged product item it
may be convenient to designate
the traditional linear bar code as the self reference region, or, once the bar
code becomes obsolete, to provide
a special self-reference region with a standard icon.
The netpage sensing device 101 can be used to scan a UPC/EAN bar code, and can
capture an EPC
from a Hyperlabel tagged item via a single click. As shown in Figure 44, by
handling a product self
reference in the same way an embedded product reference is handled in
general, the netpage system can deliver and capture much of the same value.
Depending on the target, linking can either be based on the product code, or
on a product
description or keywords derived from the product code.
There are two common situations where a consumer scans a product code: (1)
when doing
comparison shopping in a retail store; and (2) when adding a used-up grocery
item to a shopping list. By
allowing the consumer to select different services for different product
categories, the netpage system
provides maximum flexibility and value.
9.6.5 EDITORIAL LINKING
A publisher can add value to the editorial content of a print publication via
a web site in
several ways. The web site can contain more extensive information relating to
a print article. It can provide
more up-to-date information such as news. It can provide background
information to an article. And it can
present related multimedia such as video and audio clips.
Many stories in print already contain at least one link, in the form of an
explicit URI, to
related information online. The netpage system can link the article explicitly
to the web page identified by
the URI. The web page may be framed so that it is displayed alongside relevant
news and ads (and further
options), as shown in Figure 46. If the print content and online content have
corresponding sections, then
each print section can link to its corresponding online section.
Ad selection is driven by keywords extracted from the immediate context of the
click, or from ad
keywords associated with the entire article or with the section in which the
click occurred.
News selection is similarly driven by keywords extracted from the immediate
context of the click,
or from news keywords associated with the entire article or with the section
in which the click occurred.
With widespread implementation of the netpage system it is likely that
hyperlinks will proliferate in
printed editorial content.
Note that editorial content is taken to include not just text but images and
graphics as well.


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9.6.6 PRODUCT DISCOVERY
Editorial content in general and images in particular provide an opportunity
for product discovery.
Where an implicit product reference can be identified in an image or text the
netpage system can link it to
product information and/or product search in any of the ways described above.
For example, if a particular brand or model of handbag is identified in a
celebrity photo, the
corresponding page description can tag that region of the photo with
corresponding ad keywords and/or a
product code.
Even when the product reference is merely to a type of product, such as a
handbag, rather than
particular brand or model, the product type can still be linked to product
search.
9.6.7 CONTEXTUAL SEARCH
Contextual search helps provide the consumer with the most relevant and useful
information no
matter where they click.
A contextual search may be performed whenever a user searches for information
to display in
response to a click, such as the ads displayed alongside other information, or
the news displayed below
editorial content. In general, when the netpage system displays online
information "linked" to printed
information, there is a continuum between that information being statically
linked and being discovered
dynamically via contextual search.
The consumer may also explicitly initiate a contextual search on arbitrary
content, as described in
Section 9.4.2.
The search query minimally corresponds to the word designated by the click (or
possibly multiple
words in the case of an underlining stroke or lasso). The query may be
augmented with information from the
spatial or logical document context of the click to improve the precision or
completeness of the search
results:
(1) The page server may recognise that the designated word is part of a multi-
word term, e.g. by dictionary
lookup or prior markup.
(2) The page server may append additional keywords to the query, based on
category-specific keywords
associated with a word, phrase, line, sentence, paragraph, section, article,
etc. of the document.
(3) The page server may incorporate document meta-data, such as language, in
the query.
(4) The page server may determine the partial semantics (e.g. part of speech)
or full semantics of the
designated word or phrase from its context, and incorporate this in the query
(and similarly determine the
semantics of the content being searched).
(5) A click may also designate an image or graphic, in which case the query is
constructed from keywords
and/or concepts associated with the image or graphic, or with the region
thereof containing the click.
(6) Beyond the document context of the click, the query may be further
augmented with information from the
environmental context and user context. The environmental context can include
geographic location, time of
day, day of week, date, weather, etc. The user context can include home
location, language, demographic,
click history, search history, preferences, etc.


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9.6.8 EXPLICIT CONTEXTUAL SEARCH
Explicit contextual search provides the consumer with useful information
independent of the usual
editorial (or ad) context of the publication.
To provide the consumer with a useful collection of information in response to
an explicit
contextual search, the netpage system may use the query to search the general
web (e.g. using Google), as
well as an encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia), news (e.g. using Google news), and
combine the results in a single
page as shown in Figure 47. Relevant ads may be displayed alongside the search
results. Answers.com, for
example, performs similar aggregation of search results from disparate
sources.
Where appropriate, the target of an explicit contextual search can be limited
to a closed or
constrained domain. For example, a contextual search of the fine print of a
pharmaceutical ad may target
authoritative information rather than the open web.
If a netpage sensing device has two modes (e.g. via a two-position finger
switch or a finger switch
and a nib switch), then one mode can be dedicated to contextual search, and
the contextual search can ignore
hyperlinks (e.g. allowing the text of a hyperlink to be the subject of
contextual search), and the other mode can be dedicated to explicit and
implicit hyperlinking, as described
above. If a sensing device has only one mode, then hyperlinking can take
precedence over contextual search
wherever there is an explicit hyperlink, with contextual search operative
everywhere else. Alternatively,
contextual search can be presented as a screen option alongside other options
such as implicit hyperlinking.
Alternatively still, the results of implicit hyperlinking can be combined with
the results of contextual search.
9.6.9 CONTENT EXTRACTION
Content extraction provides a convenient mechanism for the consumer to share
or re-purpose
printed content. The consumer can use their sensing device to designate, via a
click, a printed object such as
an image or piece of text. They can also designate an arbitrary region on a
printed page via a lasso gesture. In
either case they can subsequently paste the selected content into a desktop
application such as a word
processor, as unformatted or formatted text, as a raw selection or a logical
selection (paragraph, section,
article, page, document, etc.), as an image, etc.; record the selected content
in a scrapbook; e-mail the
selected content to a friend; etc. The selected content optionally preserves
any embedded netpage
interactivity, and thereby continues to support revenue-earning click-
throughs.
9.6.10 BOOKMARKING
When the consumer is operating their netpage sensing device offline, either
due to lack of
connectivity or because it is inconvenient to interact with a relay device,
the netpage system can continue to
capture their netpage interactions so that it can deliver the value of those
interactions at a more convenient
time. Interactions can be captured as passive bookmarks or as more active
click-throughs, or as a mixture of
the two depending on context.


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9.6.11 CHARGING MODELS FOR EDITORIAL AND ADVERTISEMENT LINKING
As described Section 9.6.5 above, and as illustrated in Figure 63, a user can
interact with the
editorial content of a printed publication to link to a related web site, or
to initiate an online search. Linking
can be via an explicit printed hyperlink, or via a more general interaction
with a printed article.
5 Whether linking to a web site or initiating an online search, ads related to
the content of the printed
publication and/or to the content of the linked web site can be displayed
alongside the linked web site or
search results.
The user can subsequently click on one of the displayed ads to enter the
corresponding
merchant's web site, and can then complete an online purchase if desired.
10 The merchant may be willing to pay a fee when its ad displayed, and/or when
the user
clicks on the ad to enter the merchant's site, and/or when the user completes
a purchase.
In order to maximise the likelihood that the user will click on an ad, the
advertiser can specify
criteria according to which the ad should be placed. Criteria may be based on
the context of the original
interaction between the user and the printed publication, as well as
characteristics of the user (such as
15 demographic) and the user's environment (such as location).
As described in Section 9.6.2 above, and as illustrated in Figure 64, a user
can also interact with the
advertising content of a printed publication to link to a brand or product web
site, or to initiate an online
product search. Product searches can also be initiated from product references
embedded in editorial content,
such as product reviews. Linking can be via an explicit printed hyperlink, or
via a more general interaction
20 with a printed ad.
Figure 65 shows the interaction between various entities as a result of the
basic interaction shown in
Figure 63.
The publisher 2000 is the publisher of the print publication that the user
2002 is interacting with.
The publisher 2000 provides the editorial setting for user interactions that
lead to the display of online ads,
25 and so may deserve a share of click-through and sales commission revenue.
The device issuer 2004 is the issuer of the sensing device 101 that the user
2002 is using to interact
with the print publication. The sensing device may be a clicker, pointer or
pen, or one of these incorporated
into a PDA or mobile phone. The device typically incorporates a unique user or
device identifier (e.g. pen ID
61) that it inserts in interaction data that it generates, thereby allowing
the device issuer to be identified from
30 device interaction data. The device or user identifier may also be inserted
in interaction data by an
intermediate relay device 601 such as a mobile phone. The device issuer 2004
may provide the sensing
device 101 to the user for free, or at least below cost, and so may deserve a
share of click-through and sales
commission revenue.
Similarly, the user 2002 may have invested in purchasing the print publication
and/or the sensing
35 device, so may deserve a share of click-through and sales commission
revenue.
An online advertiser 2006 is a source of online ads, and is typically a
merchant wishing to drive
traffic to its web site.
An ad aggregator 2008 acts as an intermediary between advertisers 2006 and
publishers 2000,
aggregating both ads and advertising space. An online ad aggregator typically
allows advertisers to bid for


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online ad placement, automatically places ads by matching specified placement
criteria to the display
context, and automatically charges the advertiser for actual ad placements
and/or click-throughs.
A content provider 2010 provides online content that the print publication may
link to directly or
via search. The print publisher may also provide online content. The online
content provider 2010 may also
be a search provider such as Google.
The system provider 2012 may provide the netpage web server 201, which blends
linked content or
search results with online ads. The system provider 2012 and the ad aggregator
2008 can be a single entity,
or they can be separate entities that cooperate to serve appropriate ads and
mediate ad click-throughs. The
system provider may make use of more than one ad aggregator.
The system provider 2012 typically mediates ad click-throughs to enable it to
charge the advertiser
2006 (either directly or via an ad aggregator 2008).
Figure 65 shows an online advertiser 2006 placing an ad with an ad aggregator
2008. As described in
Section 9.7 below, the ad placement may be part of an ad campaign and subject
to a campaign-specific (or
overall) budget. The ad placement has an associated cost model, i.e. cost per
thousand (CPM) or cost per
click (CPC), and a cost agreed between the advertiser 2006 and the aggregator
2008, typically as part of a
competitive bidding process. When the aggregator 2008 places the ad it not
only respects the ad's placement
criteria, it also respects the advertiser's remaining ad budget(s).
When the user 2002 interacts with the printed publication, the sensing device
transmits interaction data to the
system provider 2012. The interaction data identifies the publication (and
hence the publisher 2000);
typically a location within the publication; the device itself and/or the user
2002; and a user action (either via
a device mode, button state, or interaction gesture). The user action may also
depend on the content of the
publication, including its interactivity markup.
As discussed in Section 9.1, the system provider 2012 may operate both a
document / page service,
for interpreting the user's interaction data and generating a request
(including context data) for a blended
web page, and a portal service, for serving the blended web page.
The system provider 2012 communicates with one or more content providers and
ad aggregators to
retrieve content and ads to create a blended web page to display to the user.
Each online ad incorporates a
hyperlink to the corresponding merchant web site.
The system provider 2012 can at this point charge the advertiser an ad
placement fee if the ad
placement cost model is CPM. This charging transaction is not shown in Figure
65, but can occur in the same
way as described for a click-through fee below.
When the user 2002 clicks on a hyperlink in an online ad, the system provider
2012 mediates the
click in order to gain visibility of the click-through and thereby charge the
advertiser a click-through fee. The
system provider 2012 forwards the web page request to the advertiser 2006
(i.e. merchant), who in turn
serves the web page to the user 2002.
The system provider 2012 can at this point charge the advertiser a click-
through fee if the ad
placement cost model is CPC. The system provider 2012 can charge the
advertiser 2006 indirectly by
charging the ad aggregator (debit 1) and having the ad aggregator charge the
advertiser (debit 2).


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Alternatively the system provider 2012 can charge the advertiser 2006 directly
(not shown), particularly if
the system provider and the ad aggregator are the same entity.
The system provider 2012 may credit the online content provider 2010, device
issuer 2004, user
2002 and/or publisher 2000 with a proportion of the click-through fee or
placement fee (credits 3, 4, 5 and 6
respectively).
Figure 66 also shows the interaction between various entities as a result of
the basic interaction
shown in Figure 63, but including the user 2002 completing a purchase via the
merchant web site.
The interaction proceeds as described above in relation to Figure 65, up to
and including the point
where the merchant web page is displayed to the user 2002.
The system provider 2012 may still charge the advertiser a placement fee or
click-through fee as
described above, and credit other participants. This is not shown in Figure
66.
When the user 2002 completes a purchase via the merchant web site, the
merchant may credit the
system provider with a sales commission (credit 7). Amazon is an example of a
merchant that routinely pays
sales commissions to other web sites that refer leads (via click-throughs). In
the present case the system
provider, since it mediates the original click-through to the merchant web
site, acts as the referring web site.
The mediator of the click, i.e. the system provider, identifies itself to the
merchant via a parameter in the
URI.
The system provider 2012 can then share a proportion of the sales commission
with other
participating entities such as the online content provider 2010, device issuer
2004, user 2002 and/or
publisher 2000 (credits 8, 9, 10 and 11 respectively).
Although not shown in Figure 65 or Figure 66, the system provider 2012 may
also credit an author
of (or holder of rights to) the specific printed content of the publication
that the user is interacting with, or
the online content displayed in response to the user interaction.
Debits and credits need not, in general, be transmitted between entities with
the same
granularity as click-throughs. The system provider 2012 may accumulate debits
in the ad aggregator's,
advertiser's and merchant's accounts, and credits in the user's, publisher's,
device issuer's and content
provider's accounts, as shown in Section 9.7.
Where the context of the user interaction is a print advertisement, as shown
in Figure 64, the system
provider 2012 can choose to credit the print advertiser with a proportion of
online ad placement fees, click-
through fees and/or sales commissions arising from the interaction. The print
advertiser effectively plays the
role of the publisher (or author), since it has authored the print ad and has
paid for its placement. This
provides a mechanism for providing the print advertiser with a rebate on the
original print ad placement fee,
in recognition of online fees earned by the system provider via the print ad.
Alternatively, the print advertiser
may be charged a click-through fee.
When the user interaction initiates a product search, as shown in Figure 64,
the resulting
web page typically contains both merchant links and online ads. These can both
be treated as online ads for
the purpose of charging, as described above in relation to placement fees,
click-through fees and sales
commissions. However, their individual treatment may differ. For example, it
is typical to charge click-
through fees on online ads but sales commissions on sales arising from click-
throughs on merchant listings.


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As an alternative to the system provider 2012 crediting the print advertiser
with an effective rebate,
the print advertiser can instead play the role of the system provider, with
respect to both online ad display
and product search, by bypassing the system provider and fully linking the
print ad to its own web presence.
The publisher 2000, or an entity associated with the publisher, can also play
the role of the system
provider for the purposes of serving blended content, mediating user
interactions and collecting and sharing
ad revenue.

9.7 OBJECT MODEL FOR SEARCHING AND PORTAL LINKING
In Sections 1.3 and 1.7, there was described an object model for a typical
netpage document 836.
There is now described in detail a corresponding object model, further
elaborated to illustrate support for
keyword, concept and contextual searching. The skilled person will readily
appreciate where the object
models correspond and where enhancements have been made.

9.7.1 DOCUMENT
As illustrated in Figure 67, a document 836 consists of a set of document
elements 837 arranged
into both a logical structure and a physical structure. The logical structure
consists of an arbitrary hierarchy
of groups 838, allowing structures such as articles 507, advertisements 1105
and forms 867 to be represented
(see Figure 68). The physical structure consists of a sequence of numbered
pages 1100, each with an
associated page description 5 specifying the placement of document elements
837. Since a single document
element 837 may span a number of pages 1100, it may have a corresponding
number of formatted page
elements 835, each defining the position and extent (i.e. zone 58) of a
fragment of the document element.
A page 1100 may also use a page template 1101 that contains recurring elements
such as headers
and footers.
As illustrated in Figure 69, a zone 58 consists of one or more closed regions
1107 defined in the
page description 5 for a page 1100. The outline of a closed region 1107 may be
defined by a rectangle 1108
or a polygon 1109, or more smoothly by a polyspline 1110 (e.g. a set of cubic
Bezier spline segments).
Document elements 837 include visual elements 843, region elements 1103, and
field elements 845.
Visual elements 843 represent textflows 848, images 849, graphics 850 etc.
(see Figures 70 and 15). Region
elements represent arbitrary regions to which information can be attached and
within which user input can be
interpreted in a particular way. Field elements 845 represent fields for
capturing
user input such as handwriting on paper, or text input on the screen (see
Figures 71 and 21). They are
typically arranged into multi-field forms.
A document element 837 optionally has an associated link 844 that identifies
an associated
resource, such as a Web page or online application, via a Uniform Resource
Identifier (URI). The resource is
typically retrieved and displayed when the user interacts with the zone 58 of
a page element 835 associated
with the document element, i.e. the entire document element 837 acts as a
hyperlink to the external resource.
A form is associated with a target application via a link 844. The target
application receives a
submission of that form when a submit field of the form is activated. When
form fields accept handwriting,
gesture and handwriting recognition are performed as necessary before form
submission.


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As already described with reference to Figure 37, a styled text object 855 may
be decomposed into a
set of styled paragraphs 1012, styled words 1014 and styled characters 1016.
As illustrated in Figure 72, a styled text object 855 may comprise a marked-up
text element 1111
having inline text markup. Inline text mark-up 1112 may include inline
structural markup 1114, style markup
1115, link markup 1116 and semantic markup 1117. Markup can also be applied to
arbitrary character
sequences 1113, and may be nested.
Structural markup 1114 may specify headings 1118, sections 1119, etc. Style
markup 1115 may
specify font family 1120, size 1121, angle, weight, color, etc. Link markup
1116 may specify links 844 etc.
Semantic markup 1117 typically contains a reference to a subject description
1120, which may specify the
meaning of individual terms through to the subject matter of entire sections.
Semantic markup 1117 may also
contain a reference to a resource description 842.
As illustrated in Figure 73, the content and layout of most printed matter,
including books,
magazines, newspapers, inserts, direct mail, brochures, catalogs, posters and
fill-in forms, can be described
by a document 836. The same is true of much digital content, including web
pages.

9.7.2 RESOURCE DESCRIPTION
As illustrated in Figure 74, content objects 840, documents 836, publications
1127, etc., are referred
to more abstractly as resources 1128.
A resource 1128 may have an associated resource description 842 which provides
information about
the resource and its content.
A resource description 842 provides information about a resource 1128 via a
resource description
term 1126 to enable content discovery. As illustrated in Figure 75, a resource
description term 1126 may
include a title term 1126a identifying the name or title of a resource, a
creator term 1126b identifying the
creator(s) or author entity 1130, a subject term 1126c identifying the subject
description 1120 of its content,
a description term 1126d identifying a human-readable description of its
content, a publisher term 1126e
identifying a publisher entity 1131, a contributor term 1126f identifying its
contributors or author 1130, a
date term 1126g identifying one or more dates in its lifecycle, a type term
1126h identifying the nature or
type of its content, a format term 1127i identifying its physical or digital
format, an identifier term 1126j
providing an unambiguous identifier for the resource 1128, a source term 1126k
identifying references to
parent or source resources 1128, a language term 11261 identifying the
language of its content, a relation
term 1126m identifying references to related resources 1128, a coverage term
1126n identifying a subject
description 1120 and the coverage or scope of its content (including the
spatial or temporal topic of the
content), and a rights term 1126o identifying a rights holder entity 1129 and
any rights held in or over the
resource (e.g. copyright), a portal.
The elements described here are based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(DCMI) element set
[Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, DCMI Metadata Terms, tatt~~://dublici
coreorg;%documents/dcini-ternns, the
contents of which is herein incorporated by reference]. Many additional
elements may also be defined in
accordance with the DCMI element set.


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A resource description 842 may also identify a portal specification 1132 and
search specifications
1133 (via a corresponding portal spec reference term 1126p and search spec
reference term 1126q) to assist
with navigation from the resource to related online resources.
A subject description 1120 provides specific information about the content of
a resource.
5 As illustrated in Figure 76, a subject description 1120 consists of a set of
subject description terms
1144. A term 1145 has a weight which indicates how strongly it represents the
content in relation to other
terms in the description 1120.
A keyword term 1146 specifies a word or multi-word term. It supports content
discovery via lexical
matching. A keyword 1146 may be augmented with a supersense 1147, i.e. a
conceptual classification, to
10 imbue it with partial semantics [Ciaramita, M., and M. Johnson, "Supersense
Tagging of Unknown Nouns in
WordNet", Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing,
2003, pp.168-175, the contents of which is herein incorporated by reference].
A concept term 1148 specifies a concept 1149 within an ontology. It supports
content discovery via
semantic matching, supporting greater precision and recall than lexical
matching. A concept term 1148
15 identifies, either implicitly or explicitly (e.g. via a URI), the ontology
within which it is defined.
As illustrated in Figure 77, an ontology 1150 provides a systematic
categorization of the
concepts 1149 in a field of knowledge via semantic relations 1151 between
those concepts. The W3C's Web
Ontology Language (OWL) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) support the
definition of
ontologies [see W3C, Web Ontology Language and Resource Description
20 Framework (RDF), http./%wsAw.w3.org;'RDF, the contents of which are herein
incorporated by reference].
As illustrated in Figure 78, a lexicon 1152, which relates words to word
senses, defines a kind of
ontology by defining concepts 1149 via sets of synonyms as well as via
semantic relations such as antonymy
(opposites), hypernymy / hyponymy (genericity / specificity), holonymy /
meronymy (noun whole / part),
and troponymy (verb manner specificity). As shown in Figure 78 a concept 1149
may comprise a noun
25 concept 1153, an adjective concept 1154, an adverb concept 1155 or a verb
concept 1156. WordNet is a
good example of such a lexicon [see Princeton University Cognitive Science
Laboratory, WordNet - a lexical
database for the English language, http:,%'worchaet.12ri3~ccton.ed3z/ and
Miller, G.A., C. Leacock, R. Tengi,
and R.T. Bunker, "A Semantic Concordance", Proceedings of the Workshop on
Human Language
Technology, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993, pp.303-308, the contents of which are
herein incorporated by
30 reference].
Figure 79 illustrates a common set of useful specialisations of the noun
concept 1153.
A portal specification 1132 is used to assist with navigation to a portal
capable of serving blended
information associated with a resource 1128. As illustrated in Figure 80, a
portal specification 1132 may
identify, via a portal specification term 1202, a portal template URI 1134 for
making requests to the portal.
35 The portal template URI 1134 typically provides a parameter slot for the
URI of a primary resource to be
served, as part of a blend, by the portal. The primary resource is typically
identified by a link 844 associated
with a document element 837. The portal template URI 1134 may also provide
parameter slots for news
subject descriptions, ad subject descriptions (etc.) for news and ads (etc.)
to be included in the blend.


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A portal specification 1132 may identify the portal more abstractly via an
identifier 1135 (which
may be a URI). Resolving the portal identifier 1135 to a portal template URI
1134 at runtime allows the
portal template URI to evolve over time.
A search specification 1133, is used to assist with navigation to a search
engine capable of serving
search results in response to searches from the content of a resource. As
illustrated in Figure 81, a search
specification 1132 can identify a search template URI 1136 for making requests
to the search engine. The
search template URI 1136 typically provides a parameter slot for a query.
A search specification 1133 may identify the search engine more abstractly via
an identifier 1137
(which may be a URI). Resolving the search engine identifier 1137 to a search
template URI 1136 at runtime
allows the search template URI to evolve over time.
A search specification 1133 may identify, via a search specification term
1204, a specific search
domain 1138. This may simply be an internet domain name, or a subject domain
known to a particular search
engine. The domain is typically passed to the search engine via a parameter
slot in the search template URI
1136.
A search specification 1133 may identify a subject description 1120 above and
beyond any subject
description derivable from the content of the resource, e.g. to trigger the
placement of particular ads.
As illustrated in Figure 82, a resource description 842 may include search
specification terms 1204
for general-purpose (e.g. encyclopedic) searches 1139, news searches 1140
(e.g. for the purpose of portal
blending), and ad searches 1141 (e.g. for the purpose of portal blending).
9.7.3 ENVIRONMENT DESCRIPTION
The user's environment provides a useful source of context during a query.
As illustrated in Figure 83, an environment description 1160 provides
information about the user's
environment, including geographic location 1161, date 1162, time 1163, weather
1164, etc.
As illustrated in Figure 84, geographic location 1165 may be specified via
absolute coordinates
1142, or via a place concept 1143 in an available ontology.
Absolute coordinates may be obtained from a GPS receiver incorporated into the
user's pointer
device 101 or relay device 601, or from the mobile network. A place name or
place concept 1143 may be
obtained from the mobile network, or may be specified by the user manually.
9.7.4 USER DESCRIPTION
The user also provides a useful source of context during a query.
As illustrated in Figure 85, a user description 1166 provides information
about the user entity 1167,
including home location 1168, demographic 1169, interests 1170, language 1172,
etc.
A user description 1166 can also contain a history 1171 of recent subjects
explored by the user,
accumulated during previous browsing and click-throughs.
A user description 1166 is available when the user entity 1167 is both known
to the system and
identified, e.g. via the identity of the user's pointer 101 or relay device
601, at the time a query is issued.


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9.7.5 QUERY
A query expresses a set of conditions that a document (or ad placement) must
meet to be
considered a match during a search.
As illustrated in Figure 86, a query consists of a query expression 1173 which
combines further
sub-expressions and query terms 1178 via unary and binary operators 1176 and
1177. Operators include
boolean operators 1179 as well as occurrence and proximity constraints 1180
and 1181, as illustrated in
Figure 87.
A query sub-expression has a weight which indicates how strongly it represents
the query in relation
to other sub-expressions in the query.
A query term 1178 can be any term from a resource description term 1126,
subject description term
1144, environment description term 1174, and user description term 1175. A
query term 1178 can also refer
directly to a document element 837 e.g. to allow ad placement in response to
user interaction with a
document element 837.

9.7.6 CONCORDANCE
Conceptually, a query can be applied to each document directly. In practice,
however, a
concordance 1182 of document content is usually constructed beforehand to
allow efficient query
processing, as illustrated in Figure 88. If documents contain semantic markup
or are subjected to automatic
semantic analysis, then a semantic concordance 1182 can be built.
9.7.7 ADVERTISER AND AD
An advertiser entity 1184 may pay to place ads in a printed publication or
online web page, with
placement being contingent on the context of the placement meeting certain
criteria.
As illustrated in Figure 89, an ad placement can specify arbitrary matching
criteria by way of a
general query expression 1173. This allows ad placement criteria 1185 to
specify terms relating to the user
(such as demographic or history), the environment (such as location or
weather), and specific document
elements. The latter allows an advertiser to bid for ad placements in response
to user interactions in arbitrary
regions of a publication.
Ads may also be selected and ranked according to other criteria, such as their
performance to date,
and advertisers' overall and campaign-specific budgets and corresponding ad
spending rates.
The overall and publication-specific click-through rates (CTRs) of an ad allow
the advertiser to
judge the success of the ad, either in isolation or relative to other ads in
the campaign. The CTRs of the
publications in which the ad appears, aggregated from the CTRs of individual
document elements, provides
the advertiser with an indication of the potential CTR of an actual ad
placement. Interaction statistics 2018
are maintained on a per-user basis, e.g. to allow the total population of
interacting users to be identified. User
details need not be revealed to advertisers.

9.7.8 ENTITY
An entity 1190 represents a person or organisation that plays some role in the
system.


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As illustrated in Figure 90, an entity 1190 has various details 1192 such as a
name, contact details,
etc. An entity also has an account 1191 which is used to debit expenses and
credit income. When a user
entity 1167 clicks on an online ad, for example, the account of the
corresponding advertiser 1184 may be
debited and the account of the corresponding advertising aggregator 1193 may
be credited (see Section
9.6.11 for details of charging models).
The user optionally has a preferred portal specification and an ordered set of
preferred search
specifications which may be used in the absence of document-specific portal
and search specifications.

9.8 CONTEXTUAL DOCUMENT SEARCH
9.8.1 OVERVIEW
The purpose of search is to discover documents relevant to the user's intent.
Search can suffer from two related problems: low precision and low recall. Low
precision results
when documents of low relevance are included in the search results. These are
often referred to as false
positives. Low recall results when documents of high relevance are excluded
from the search results. These
are often referred to as false nagatives. Improving precision usually comes at
the cost of reducing recall.
Improving recall usually comes at the cost of reducing precision.
Figure 91 shows the basic data flow during a contextual document search.
The user interacts with a printed page to initiate a search. The user
interaction, and hence the user
input, typically designates one or more words within a larger text. Search is
usually an implicit side-effect of
the user interaction.
The various steps are described in the following sections.
Both source and target documents are assumed to at least partially use the
document object model
defined in Section 9.7.

9.8.2 SUBJECT DESCRIPTION
Low precision generally results from ambiguity, either in relation to an
individual term or in relation
to the user's overall intent. Term ambiguity can be resolved by determining
the sense of a term and then
incorporating that sense into the query. The sense of a term can be determined
either by analysis of the
context in which it appears, or by explicitly defining it. As an example, if
the user clicks on the word
"jaguar" in a text, it is useful to know whether the word refers to a jaguar
car or a jaguar animal. Overall user
intent is indicated both by the broader document context of the user
interaction, as well as the history of the
user's recent interactions. Both can be brought to bear during a search.
Inline semantic markup can be used in several ways to resolve this ambiguity.
The term can be
disambiguated by being linked explicitly to a concept in an ontology, e.g.:
="the Jaguar drives beautifully" can be marked up as
"the <concept value="jaguarautomobile">Jaguar</concept> drives beautifully"
="the jaguar preys on small animals" can be marked up as
"the <concept value="jaguaranimal">jaguar</concept> preys on small animals".


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The term can also be disambiguated using a context keyword, e.g.:

="the Jaguar drives beautifully" can be marked up as
"the <keyword value="automobile">Jaguar</keyword> drives beautifully"
="the jaguar preys on small animals" can be marked up as
"the <keyword value="animal">jaguar</keyword> preys on small animals".

This kind of disambiguation can also specified at a structural level in the
document.
Descriptions such as these, whether specified at a structural level or via
inline markup, can be created either
manually or automatically. Manual semantic tagging can be arbitrarily
accurate, but scales relatively poorly
(particularly for existing un-tagged content). However, since it is in the
interests of authors to create
discoverable documents, and since semantic tagging can be incorporated into
future authoring tools, the
proportion of semantically tagged content is likely to increase. This is the
purpose of efforts such as the
W3C's Semantic Web initiative [see W3C, Semantic Web,
htt¾~_ir'u7ww_tiv_3_or2!20'~~1/sw; W3C, Web
Ontology Language (OWL), lztt~?://~~rsw,w3.oxg%2004%d3WF:; and Guha, R., R.
McCool, and E. Miller,
"Semantic Search", Proceedings of the 12`h International Conference on World
Wide Web, Budapest,
Hungary, 2003, pp.700-709, the contents of which are herein incorporated by
reference].
Automated semantic tagging via text analysis is typically less accurate than
manual semantic
tagging, but scales very well and is particularly applicable to existing un-
tagged content. Given a lexicon and
ontology such as WordNet, it is possible to determine with a fairly high
degree of certainty the correct sense
of most terms in a text. In one approach the text is processed linearly from
start to finish, assigning a sense to
each word or multi-word term in turn by minimising the semantic distance of
the term's sense from the
senses of its immediate neighbours in the text [see Sussna, M., "Word Sense
Disambiguation for Free-Text
Indexing Using a Massive Semantic Network", Proceedings of the Second
International Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management, Washington, D.C., United States, 1993,
pp.67-74, the contents of
which is herein incorporated by reference].
For example, in the case of "the Jaguar drives beautifully", the nearby verb
"drives" helps to assign
a sense of <jaguar_automobile> to "Jaguar", and in the case of "the jaguar
preys on small animals", the
nearby verb "preys" and noun "animals" help to assign a sense of
<jaguar_animal> to "jaguar". Part of
speech analysis [see Brill, E., "A Simple Rule-Based Part of Speech Tagger",
Proceedings of the Workshop
on Speech and Natural Language, Harriman, New York, USA, 1992, pp.112-116, the
contents of which is
herein incorporated by reference] and stop-word removal are performed before
word sense disambiguation.
More complex semantic analysis is also possible, such as resolving direct and
indirect anaphora [see
Fan, J., K. Barker, and B. Porter, "Indirect Anaphora Resolution as Semantic
Path Search", Proceedings of
the 3rd International Conference on Knowledge Capture, Banff, Alberta, Canada,
2005, pp.153-160, the
contents of which is herein incorporated by reference]. For example, in the
case of "the Jaguar drives
beautifully; the 5.OL V8 engine produces 370hp", it is useful to not only
resolve "engine" to
<engine_automobile>, but also to identify its antecedent <jaguar_automobile>.


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Shallower semantic analysis is also possible, such as recognising part of
speech, recognising named
entities [see Guha, R., and R. McCool, "TAP: A Semantic Web Platform",
Computer Networks: The
International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, 42(5),
August 2003, pp.557-577,
Elsevier North-Holland and Mikheev, A., M. Moens, and C. Grover, "Named Entity
Recognition without
5 Gazetteers", Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on European Chapter of the
Association for
Computational Linguistics, Bergen, Norway, 1999, pp.1-8, the contents of which
are herein incorporated by
reference], and recognising the supersense of a noun.
When semantic tagging is performed after a document (or fragment thereof, such
as an ad) has been
authored, region descriptions provide a useful alternative to structural
tagging or inline markup. They also
10 provide a useful mechanism for tagging image-based and graphic document
content. For example, different
elements within a photo of a celebrity on the red carpet can be tagged with
different subject descriptions. The
outline of the dress can be associated with a subject description that
identifies the dress maker; the outline of
the shoes can be associated with a subject description that identifies the
brand and possibly the specific
product; etc. The overall image can be associated with a description of the
celebrity and the event, etc.
15 Low recall generally results from a mismatch between terms used to describe
the source document
and terms used to describe target documents. Semantic tagging therefore also
serves to improve recall.

9.8.3 QUERY GENERATION
During query generation the primary search terms are first identified. These
terms correspond to the
20 words designated directly by the user on the printed page.
If the user clicks on a word then only that word is included by default. If
the user underlines, circles
or otherwise designates multiple words, then all of those words are included.
Different gestures may be taken to indicate the literal and conceptual
designation of multiple words
respectively. In the literal case the words are treated as a multi-word
phrase, and stop words are retained. In
25 the conceptual case the words are treated as representing multiple
concepts, and stop words are discarded.
These different gestures might consist of underlining and circling,
respectively, or striking through and
underlining, respectively, etc.
If any designated word or words are known to be part of a multi-word term,
then that entire term is
used in the query. There are several ways a multi-word term can be discovered.
The source text may include
30 inline semantic markup which indicates that two or more adjacent words are
part of a multi-word term, e.g.:
"The <term>North Pole</term> is very cold". The source document may include or
reference a lexicon
which identifies or defines terms that appear in the source text, including
multi-word terms. Part-of-speech
analysis can also help identify multi-word terms, particularly in conjunction
with a named entity database.
Named entity recognition can also succeed with a limited database. Partial or
full semantic analysis can, in
35 general, be performed either beforehand and recorded as part of or
alongside a document, or can be
performed during query generation.
If the source text includes inline semantic markup which associates subject
description terms with
individual text terms, then those subject descriptions terms are used in place
of the text terms if they are


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96
compatible with the target documents being searched. Whether subject
description terms are used or not,
their weights are available during query processing for ranking purposes.
After identifying the primary search terms a set of context terms is
identified to help improve query
precision. Such context terms can be identified in a number of ways. The
source text itself can be analysed to
extract a set of candidate context terms [see Kraft, R., "Search Systems and
Methods using In-Line
Contextual Queries", US Patent Application US 2 0 0 6/0 02 601 3, 2 February
2006 and Kraft, R., F. Marghoul,
and C.C. Chang, "Y!Q: Contextual Search at the Point of Inspiration",
Proceedings of the 14th ACM
International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Bremen,
Germany, 2005, pp.816-
823, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference]. This process
can identify multi-word terms
in any of the ways described above. Structural units of the source document,
such as sections, articles, etc.,
may have associated subject descriptions containing subject description terms.
Context terms can be obtained
from any structural unit that encloses the location of the primary search
terms. Hierarchically closer
structural units can be favoured over hierarchically more distant units, or
the closest unit with a subject
description can be used exclusively.
Context terms can also be drawn from the environment context or user context.
For example, the
user's current or home location may provide useful context as well as the
user's recent interaction history.
A content region with a subject description can also be used as a source of
context terms. If the
query does not otherwise contain primary search terms, e.g. if the content
region describes part of an image,
then the subject description of the image region can also be used as a source
of primary search terms.
Whenever context terms are obtained from subject description terms, terms that
do not
relate to the domain of the search (e.g. <news> versus <general search>) are
ignored. Any term that lacks a
domain qualifier is taken to relate to all domains.

9.8.4 QUERY PROCESSING
During query processing the concordance is used to identify target documents
that match all of the
primary search terms. Each such document may have a domain-specific ranking.
Web pages, for example,
are commonly ranked according to how often they are cited and the ranking of
the web sites that cite them.
Matching target documents may be ranked according to the proximity and
frequency of the primary search
terms in those documents, as well as by the weight of each primary search
term, if available.
For each matching document we determine which context terms it also matches.
Target documents
that match context terms are given a higher ranking than target documents that
don't. Matching target
documents may also be ranked according to the proximity and frequency of the
context terms in those
documents, as well as by the weight of each context term, if available.
Given a set of primary search terms {P0, P1, ..., Pn} and a set of context
terms {C0, Cl, ..., Cm},
the query can be expressed as (P0 AND P1 AND ... AND Pn} AND {NULL OR CO OR C1
OR ... OR Cm}.
Full query semantics are defined in the object model in Section 9.7.
Where concept terms are available for both the source document and the target
documents, query
processing utilises a semantic concordance rather than a normal (lexical)
concordance. Section 9.8.5


CA 02662726 2009-03-06
WO 2008/046128 PCT/AU2007/000734
97
discusses possible strategies when the source document and/or the target
documents lack semantic
descriptions.
In practice, query processing may need to be delegated to a third party search
engine such as
Google, Yahoo!, etc. In that case the query must be generated so that it is
compatible with the capabilities of
the search engine. If the search engine accepts queries with optional terms,
then context terms can be
included in the query passed to the search engine. The number of context terms
may need to be restricted.
This can be done on the basis of structural proximity to the primary search
terms, and on relative weights.
If the search engine does not support optional search terms, then the primary
search terms are just
sent to the search engine, and the context terms are used to rank bias the
search results. In this case the
example query would be (P 1 AND P2 AND ... AND Pn).
It is also possibly to perform multiple sub-queries, each including a
different combination of one or
more of the context terms, and rank aggregate the results [see Kraft, R., C.C.
Chang, F. Marghoul, and R.
Kumar, "Searching with Context", Proceedings of the 15th International
Conference on World Wide Web,
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2006, pp.477-486, the contents of which is herein
incorporated by reference].
In this case the sub-queries could include (P1 AND P2 AND ... AND Pn AND CO),
(P1 AND P2
AND ... Pn AND C1), etc.

9.8.5 STRATEGIES IN THE ABSENCE OF SEMANTICS
Figure 92 illustrates the various strategies available when the source
document and/or the target
documents lack semantic descriptions.
As discussed in previous sections, semantic matching improves both precision
and recall. Semantic
matching is therefore preferred over lexical matching. Where either the source
or target lacks semantic tags,
it is useful to perform ad hoc semantic analysis to allow semantic matching.
Where semantic tags use
different ontologies, ontology matching can be used to normalise either set of
tags. Where target documents
lack semantic tags, semantic analysis can be performed at the same time as
content indexing, and resulting
subject descriptions can be stored separately from the target documents (or
not stored at all) as well as being
incorporated in the semantic concordance.
Where there is a mismatch it is also possible to fall back on lexical
matching. Even during lexical
matching the use of context terms significantly improves precision. Hybrid
approaches are also possible, e.g.
where a lexical query is generated from a semantic query by expanding each
concept into two or more
synonymous keywords to improve recall, or where a concept-based subject
description is expanded into a
keyword-based description in the same way.

9.9 CONTEXTUAL AD PLACEMENT
9.9.1 OVERVIEW
Ads may be displayed alongside other content that may have been selected
explicitly or discovered
via document search.


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The purpose of ad placement is to identify ads relevant to the user's intent,
to maximize value to the
user and to the advertiser. This is a very similar problem to document search,
and is addressed using a similar
contextual search mechanism.
Unlike a target document, an ad placement can specify arbitrary matching
criteria by way of a
general query expression. This allows ad placement criteria to specify terms
relating to the user (such as
demographic or history), the environment (such as location or weather), as
well as specific document
elements. The latter allows an advertiser to bid for ad placements in response
to user interactions in arbitrary
regions of a publication.
During contextual ad placement the placement criteria 1185 of candidate ads
can become the target
of a contextual search as described above. However, during ad placement, the
normal query process may
also usefully be partially reversed, as shown in Figure 93. Instead of
generating a query from the source
context and processing it against a set of target documents, we may instead
process a number of ad
placement criteria against the source context. This allows the ad placement to
be arbitrarily complex, and to
be expressed via a normal query expression.
Ad placement processing proceeds by first identifying ad placements that
specify subject terms that
match the primary terms from the source context. Processing then continues by
properly matching the
placement criteria of each candidate ad placement thus identified against the
primary terms, the source
document context, and the user and environment context.
Ads may also be selected and ranked according to other criteria, such as their
performance to date,
and advertisers' overall and campaign-specific budgets, and corresponding ad
spending rate.
In addition to matching ads to the source context, they may also or
alternatively be matched to the
context provided by the content they are intended to be displayed alongside.
This latter approach may also be used when selecting ads to be included in
targeted or personalised
editions or print publications.
9.10 NETPAGE IMAGE SUBJECT MARKUP
As described in previous sections, subject descriptions can be attached to
elements of a document to
indicate the meaning of those elements. Subject markup can aid subsequent
document discovery and can
provide context when searching for related information from a point in a
document.
Section 9.6.6 describes the case of how a page description for a printed photo
may contain
interactivity markup to enable product discovery. Subject markup is now
described in further detail with that
illustrative case, with reference to Figure 95.
Subject markup may be performed before, during or after document creation.
Reusable document
elements such as articles or images are usefully marked up before being
included in a particular document,
since subject descriptions have value beyond one document. If subject markup
is performed during or after
document creation then it is most usefully applied to document elements usable
beyond that one document.
When subject descriptions 1120 are used to facilitate search from document
content, e.g. to discover
relevant ads to display alongside linked online content, then they may be
specified as part of search
specifications 1133. This allows them to be ignored during document discovery.


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99
A subject description 1120 may be attached to an arbitrary region (or zone) of
a page defined via a
region element 1103, either by being attached to the region element directly
or by being attached to a search
specification 1133 attached to the region element.
A region element 1103, like a subject description 1120, can be created before,
during or after
document creation. Although a region element is ideal for specifying a region
of an image, it may also be
used for specifying a region of text.
A region element 1103 can be created in a graphical editor by drawing the
outline of its region, e.g.
by selecting, placing and scaling a pre-defined shape such as a rectangle, by
clicking
to define each point of a polygon, or by drawing a smooth curve using a stylus
on a graphics tablet. A region
element can also be created using a textual markup language such as XML.
A subject description 1120 can be attached to a region element 1103 by
specifying keywords 1146
and/or concepts 1149 drawn from a lexicon 1152 or ontology 1150 (including
useful noun concepts such as
people, places and dates).
Figure 95 shows a photo in an article, marked up with four illustrative
subject descriptions. In
practice a photo could be marked up with many more (and varied) subject
descriptions.
Each subject description is associated with a region of the photo via a region
element. Region
elements have a front-to-back ordering, so the handbag region can be defined
to be in front of the dress
region, as illustrated in Figure 94.
When a user interacts with a page of a document at a point in a region
described by one or more
region elements, the interaction may initiate a content or ad search using the
subject description attached to
those region elements, as described above.
The subject description at a given point is the union of the subject
descriptions of the front-most
regions containing the point at each level in the group hierarchy. As
illustrated in Figure 94, the subject
descriptions of the dress, handbag and shoes regions are never combined, but
each subject description is
combined with the subject description of the whole photo.
The subject description of the front-most region may be used as a source of
primary search terms,
while the subject descriptions of other included regions may be used as a
source of context terms. For
example, if the user interacts with the handbag region, as illustrated in
Figure 95, the handbag region can be
used a source of primary search terms and the whole photo region can be used
as a source of context terms.
CONCLUSION
The present invention has been described with reference to a preferred
embodiment and number
of specific alternative embodiments. However, it will be appreciated by those
skilled in the relevant fields
that a number of other embodiments, differing from those specifically
described, will also fall within the
spirit and scope of the present invention. Accordingly, it will be understood
that the invention is not intended
to be limited to the specific embodiments described in the present
specification, including documents
incorporated by cross-reference as appropriate. The scope of the invention is
only limited by the attached
claims.

Dessin représentatif
Une figure unique qui représente un dessin illustrant l'invention.
États administratifs

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États administratifs

Titre Date
Date de délivrance prévu Non disponible
(86) Date de dépôt PCT 2007-05-28
(87) Date de publication PCT 2008-04-24
(85) Entrée nationale 2009-03-06
Requête d'examen 2009-03-06
Demande morte 2013-05-28

Historique d'abandonnement

Date d'abandonnement Raison Reinstatement Date
2012-05-28 Taxe périodique sur la demande impayée

Historique des paiements

Type de taxes Anniversaire Échéance Montant payé Date payée
Requête d'examen 800,00 $ 2009-03-06
Le dépôt d'une demande de brevet 400,00 $ 2009-03-06
Taxe de maintien en état - Demande - nouvelle loi 2 2009-05-28 100,00 $ 2009-03-06
Enregistrement de documents 100,00 $ 2009-05-21
Taxe de maintien en état - Demande - nouvelle loi 3 2010-05-28 100,00 $ 2010-03-22
Taxe de maintien en état - Demande - nouvelle loi 4 2011-05-30 100,00 $ 2011-04-26
Titulaires au dossier

Les titulaires actuels et antérieures au dossier sont affichés en ordre alphabétique.

Titulaires actuels au dossier
SILVERBROOK RESEARCH PTY LTD
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HOLLINS, MICHAEL
LAPSTUN, PAUL
SILVERBROOK, KIA
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