Structured Data Objects: US Patent 5,220,657 commenting on US Patent 4,974,173

The following quoted text is a comment on the following Patent Library entry US Patent 4,974,173: Small-scale workspace representations indicating activities by other users (Xerox Corporation) Φ by inventors Sara A. Bly et al. in US Patent 5,220,657: Updating local copy of shared data in a collaborative system (Xerox Corporation). The following is a worthy comment but it should nonetheless be considered in the context of one set of Xerox inventors commenting on previous work by another set of Xerox inventors.

• "Copending, coassigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/127,997, now continued as Ser. No. 07/570,984; entitled "Multiple Shared Virtual Workspaces"*, and incorporated herein by reference, relates to the sharing of information and workspaces in a collaborative environment. In addition to the explanation set forth in that patent application as well as in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07485,773, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,974,173, which was a continuation of 07/127,814, now abandoned, the present invention involves the notion of a particular representation of shared structured data objects. The term, "shared structure object" is used herein to refer to any structured data object that is accessible to more than one user. A representation of a shared structured data object is any way of displaying shared data represented by the object and its contents, whether as a simple display object, as the contents of the entire display screen, or as the contents of any workspace, whether the workspace is thought of as a room, a window, a blackboard, a sketchpad, a spreadsheet, a card or any other type of entity for presenting data within an area of a display. A representation may be at full scale, occupying a substantial part of the display area, in which case the details of the shared data will ordinarily be visible to a viewer, albeit in some mapped form, such as, a sequence of characters or a bitmapped graphical object. Such a body of shared structured data objects may be amenable to many different full scale representations, as when a document can be displayed page-by-page in a desired sequence. A representation may also be at a small scale, occupying a small part of the display area, in which case, the details of the shared structured data object may not be visible. A small scale representation may also be a small portion of the full scale representation of the same shared data, showing details relating in specific ways to or attributes of the shared structured data object; it could be a shrunken version of the full scale representation of a structured data object, showing some general features of the full scale representation but omitting details; a reduced scale representation could also be an icon or other small display abstraction that shows virtually none of the features or attributes of the full scale representation other than an identifier such as a name or configuration of a structured data object.
  
  Due to the limits of human perception and the typical display size, the smallest reduced scale representations of a structured data object frequently have a fixed size of about one square inch or less, e.g., an icon symbol. The size of a reduced scale representation is typically large enough to have a characteristic shape and an identifier. Such a representation may not itself enable the user to access the corresponding data, but it may typically be selected as part of an operation to obtain a full scale representation of the corresponding data. Full scale representations, on the other hand, are often variable in size and can range from a few square inches up to the full available display area, typically enabling a user to select a display object within the full scale representation upon which an operation is to be performed, resulting in access to the corresponding data. Many conventional graphical user interfaces have readily identifiable full scale and reduced scale representations of data, respectively, such as windows and icons. The structured data object representation of this invention involves attributes of both reduced scale and full scale representations." [emphasis added]
  

* A search at USPTO for TTL/"Multiple Shared Virtual Workspaces" on 12 June 2008 revealed no results.