Proactive delivery of related tasks for identified entities

摘要

A search engine database is utilized to identify “entities”, or things for which there exists associated discrete, objective information. For hosted information that is independently available, the entity detector independently accesses such information and identifies entities. For information that has defined potential entities, such as entertainment or lifestyle information such defined potential entities are provided to the entity detector to verify, with reference to the search engine database, whether they are entities. Once entities have been identified, a related task generator, with reference to the search engine database, identifies tasks that are related to the identified entities. Such tasks include informational tasks, economic tasks, time-sensitive and location-sensitive tasks. The identified entities and related tasks are provided to applications, with metadata quantifying confidence, relationship, importance, location and time sensitivity, and the like, thereby enabling those applications to proactively provide selects ones of that information to users.

主权项

1. One or more computer-readable memory comprising computer-executable instructions for proactively presenting tasks related to identified entities, the computer-executable instructions, when executed by one or more processing units of a computing device, causing the computing device to perform steps comprising:
selecting, from among information presented to a user through an application context, defined subsets of the information that reference potential entities; receiving identified entities that were identified from the potential entities based on a search engine database; receiving the related tasks that were identified as being related to specific, individual ones of the identified entities based on the search engine database; receiving metadata quantifying a relationship between a particular identified entity and its related tasks; selecting, from among the identified entities, based on the related tasks' metadata, a selected subset of identified entities, the selected subset being less than all of the identified entities; selecting, from among the related tasks, at least one task related to each entity in the selected subset of identified entities; generating an indicator, within the application context, for each entity in the selected subset of identified entities; and generating a presentation, within the application context, of the selected at least one related task if a user action is directed towards the generated indicator.