US 20090083619 markup document generation prior art request

Question

US 20090083619

1. A method in a data processing system, comprising the steps of: receiving a document containing numerical values; receiving indications of characteristics of the numerical values, the characteristics including a unit and a magnitude; and adding the received indications into the document as tags associated with the numerical values to create a markup document.

Answer 1

This is very similar to "named entity recognition": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named-entity_recognition

Named entity recognition searches a text for known strings or string patterns, e.g. gene names (like "bco2"), and attaches markup (in other words: tags) to them in the text. You could use the named entity recognition functionality of the open-source tool KNIME to construct a recognizer that recognizes string patterns that represent numbers (using regular expressions) and search for the "characteristics" (e.g. unit) as classic named entities.

http://tech.knime.org/named-entity-recognizer-and-tag-cloud-example

Answer 2

• this claim is about attaching semantics to numerical values found in a text.
• there's lots of ways this can be done, for example with microformats: example (from: http://microformats.org/wiki/measure):

" The action figure has a height of 5 in."

=> markup:

<p class="hmeasure"> The <span class="item">action figure</span> has a <span class="type">height</span> of <span class="num">5</span> <span class="unit">in</span>. </p>