The Northern Light "Custom Search Folders" patent (5,924,090) was
applied for on May 1, 1997 (which is why NL could claim "patent pending"
when it opened to the public on August 5) and was granted on July 13,
1999. (The inventor, by the way, was Marc F. Krellenstein of Chestnut
Hill, MA, with Northern Light Technology LLC of Cambridge, MA, being the
assignee.)
Additionally, from the prior message below, the name is spelled
"Vivisimo" and its Web search engine is now called "Clusty" (the
clustering search engine) at http://clusty.com/.
All FWIW.
Harvey
--
===========================================
Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
847/506-2644 - FX: 847/506-2650 - Email: hhahn(at)ahml(dot)info
OML & Scripts web pages: http://www.ahml.info/oml/
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Watkins
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 3:36 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Patents on faceted navigation: what's the
impact?
This may have already been mentioned on this list, but Northern
Light was a search engine that created folders that served as facets as
far back as 1997/98. See
http://web.archive.org/web/19980206192654/http://www.northernlight.com/
for an example.
--Steve
Steve Watkins
Coordinator of Technology Development
CSU Monterey Bay Library
steve_watkins_at_csumb.edu
Next generation catalogs for libraries <NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu>
writes:
Didn't Visivismo have faceted browsing? I remember folders or
something
similar.
Shawn
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Andrew Nagy
> Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 3:34 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Patents on faceted navigation: what's
> the impact?
>
> Danielle Plumer wrote:
> > "Prior art" is the way to attack patents such as these, as
> Nancy states.
> >
> > The Open Source Development Laboratories has an "Open
> Source as Prior Art" site at http://osapa.org/. The goal is
> to protect innovation by reviewing, and challenging as
> necessary, "poor quality" patents that threaten the
> development of new software tools.
> >
> I have been surfing around the Wayback Machine on archive.org
to find
> instances of Faceted searching, but have not found much. It's
hard to
> find a site on the wayback machine that has more than the
> front page. I
> have looked at dell.com, ebay.com, cnet.com and since I cannot
use the
> searching mechanism it's hard to find instances of faceted
search
> results, but even so I haven't found good instances of
> faceted browsing
> with results on the same screen. Before 2001 that is.
>
> Andrew
>
Received on Mon Mar 19 2007 - 16:06:20 EDT