The present invention relates generally to information processing. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for selectively “inheriting” event schedules or other information from information sources into target datasets in ways that enable flexible use of the target datasets.
Increasingly, people are discovering the power of computer-based personal information managers (PIMs) for managing appointments and other personal information such as tasks (“to-do's”) and addresses. Individuals employ PIMs, for example, on personal computers (PCs), handheld electronic devices, and World Wide Web servers accessed via browsers. Examples of PC-based PIMs include the Sidekick® software application, which is available from Starfish® Software, Inc. (“Starfish”), the present assignee. Examples of handheld-device-based PIMs include the StarTAC® clipOn Organizer device and the REX PRO™ organizer device—both of which include licensed technology from Starfish—as well as the popular Palm™ family of organizer devices. Examples of “Web-based” PIMs include an online PIM provided by Starfish at a World Wide Web site of truesync.com. Starfish®, Sidekick®, and TrueSync® are registered trademarks of Starfish. StarTAC® is a registered trademark of Motorola, Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill. Starfish is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola, Inc. REX™ and REX PRO™ are trademarks of Franklin Electronic Publishers of Burlington, N.J. Palm™ is a trademark of Palm, Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.
The use of PIMs is ever expanding, and it has become common for an individual person to keep multiple “copies” of the same information on separate devices. For example, a user may keep his or her appointments in a dataset (i.e., collection of data) on a desktop PC at work, in a dataset on a notebook PC at home, and also in a dataset on a handheld device while in the field. Such a user is free to change the information in any one of these datasets independently of the other datasets. By doing so, the user typically spoils the equivalence between the datasets. Therefore, the user would typically synchronize these personal datasets occasionally to bring them back into equivalence. To perform such synchronization, the user generally uses a synchronization system, for example, one that is described in commonly-owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,519,606, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Besides using PIMs and synchronization systems to manage personal information, users increasingly make use of information obtained from external information sources. Such information sources are found, for example, within the proliferation of World Wide Web sites, intranet sites, or the like (all called “websites” in this document) that offer online event schedules. Such event schedules are typically read-only information sources that are available to multiple users. Initially, each such website typically offered a limited number of event schedules. Later, mass-market websites, such as Internet “portal” websites, began to each provide large numbers of public event schedules including, for example, concert schedules, sporting-event schedules, and the like. In an effort to provide ever more services to their users, some websites that provide public event schedules also provide each individual user the ability to maintain an online personal calendar dataset for recording personal appointments. At such a website, a user is allowed to select public events or public event schedules for “tracking”. Thereafter, when the user views a daily view of the user's own personal calendar, the website simultaneously displays public events for that day that the user has chosen for tracking. In this way, the website provides a rudimentary level of interaction between the user's online personal calendar provided on the website and the public event schedules provided on the website.
While adequate for the casual user, the above-described conventional calendar website is lacking in capability, especially for the modern user who has multiple calendars in multiple datasets. For example, a conventional calendar website makes no provision for machine-assisted synchronizing of the public events, as “tracked” within a user's personal online calendar on the website, with the user's other personal datasets such as datasets on PCs or on handheld devices.
Another problem with the conventional calendar website relates to a realization that a user may wish to modify public events that are tracked, for example, in a way such that the modifications are to exist only within the user's personal calendar. The conventional calendar website does not enable such modification and therefore causes user inconvenience.
What is needed are an improved system and improved techniques that can inherit information into a user's dataset and also provide additional capabilities for using the inherited information. More particularly, what is needed are such an improved system and improved techniques that provide the capability for user modification of inherited information and the capability for synchronization of inherited information with other datasets. Adding either of these capabilities would be useful, but adding both capabilities, and ensuring that they properly interact with one another, would be especially useful. What is further needed is for the improved system and techniques to be optimized for efficiency on a system on which many users, perhaps millions of users, are capable of each maintaining a dataset that can inherit information from one or more shared and public information sources. The preferred embodiment of the present invention fulfills these and other needs.