[Corpora-List] Patent application for "Referent tracking of portions of reality"

[John F. Sowa]

Werner Ceusters, Shahid Manzoor, and Barry Smith have submitted
a patent application that is so broad that it covers any program
that extracts references to entities in texts and relates them to
"portions of reality."  There would seem to be many years of prior
art, but these inventors have managed to disguise their invention
by cloaking it in philosophical jargon about "reality".  At the end
of this note is the URL and abstract.

Their application would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that
the first of the three was actually granted a patent that covers any
program that extracts "meaning" from a text as a "conceptual graph".
It is sufficiently broad to cover other representations, such as
semantic networks or any other notation for "concepts".  Their
application was submitted in 2002 and granted in 2009, despite 26
years of prior art for conceptual graphs and over 40 years of prior
art for semantic networks.  See the second URL and abstract below.

John Sowa
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http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=%22ceusters,+werner%22.IN.&OS=IN/%22ceusters,+werner%22&RS=IN/%22ceusters,+werner%22

US Patent Application 20090055437, February 26, 2009

Inventors:  Ceusters; Werner M.R.; (Buffalo, NY) ; Manzoor; Shahid; 
(Amherst, NY) ; Smith; Barry; (Williamsville, NY)

REFERENT TRACKING OF PORTIONS OF REALITY

Abstract

Management of information is facilitated by unambiguously tracking 
portions of reality over time. To track the portions of reality, a 
referent tracking system is used. The referent tracking system is able 
to communicate with other tracking systems and/or tradition information 
systems. Errors in the referent tracking system are detected and 
corrected to maintain actual representations of the portions of reality.
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http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/7493253.html

US Patent 7493253, Conceptual world representation natural language 
understanding system and method

Date Issued: February 17, 2009
Application: 10/193,886
Filed: July 12, 2002
Inventors: Ceusters; Werner (Zonnegem, BE) ; O'Donnell; Mick (Tres 
Cantos, ES) ; Montyne; Frank (Deurle, BE) ; Coppens; Frederik (Haaltert, 
BE) ; Van Mol; Maarten (Holsbeek, BE)

Abstract

A Natural Language Understanding system is provided for indexing of free 
text documents. The system according to the invention utilizes 
typographical and functional segmentation of text to identify those 
portions of free text that carry meaning. The system then uses words and 
multi-word terms and phrases identified in the free to text to identify 
concepts in the free text. The system uses a lexicon of terms linked to 
a formal ontology that is independent of a specific language to extract 
concepts from the free text based on the words and multi-word terms in 
the free text. The formal ontology contains both language independent 
domain knowledge concepts and language dependent linguistic concepts 
that govern the relationships between concepts and contain the rules 
about how language works. The system according to the current invention 
may preferably be used to index medical documents and assign codes from 
independent coding systems, such as, SNOMED, ICD-9 and ICD-10. The 
system according to the current invention may also preferably make use 
of syntactic parsing to improve the efficiency of the method.

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