Method, Apparatus, and Interface For Creating A Chain of Binary Attribute Relations

摘要

The present invention improves upon the authoring system for a content menu by disclosing a new interface and program control which enables a menu developer to create and to capture meta-query data in the form of a chain of Binary Attribute Relations. The Binary Attribute Relation or BAR represents a pair of attributes which serve as meta-query data for a primitive retrieval operation known as a BAR query. The BAR query exposes a primitive data relation in an external data file which forms a basic building block for the content menu. Recursive algorithms parse the BAR chain to create network segment of data and data relations to automatically create a knowledge representation known as a “database taxonomy”. The pairing of two attributes in a BAR link and the sequence of these links in a BAR chain adhere to a well-defined system of rules. The present invention embeds these rules in the developers' interface to guide the developer in capturing a series of meta-query data by highlighting the relevant elements of the logical structure of a data file as options, and by filtering out the irrelevant ones. Program control associated with this new interface captures the selections made by a developer and employs them to generate either runtime or compiled menu data for the content menu automatically.