Importance

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Abstract

When a user selects an arbitrary symbol 75 (word, phrase, sentence, graphic, image, etc.) from an arbitrary application 3 on a client computer 3, and copies this symbol 75 to a clipboard 79, a linker 23, being a terminate-and-stay-resident-type process, automatically captures that symbol 81 from the clipboard 79. Similarly, when a user types at a keyboard from an arbitrary application 207, those typed characters are first passed to an input method editor 201, where they are temporarily stored within a buffer 211, and when the user enters a prescribed 'okay' key sequence the characters within that buffer 211 are converted as necessary and passed to the application 207, but if the user enters a prescribed 'link' key sequence, a character string determining component 213 of the input method editor 201 passes the characters within the buffer 211 to a linker 209. In either case, the linker 23 sends the captured symbol to a URL server 5. The URL server 5 possesses a database 15, accumulated within which there are sets of symbols 105A, 105B, . . . and URLs 107A, 107B, . . . corresponding thereto, searches the database 15 and retrieves therefrom a URL corresponding to the received symbol 103, and returns that retrieved URL 109 to the linker 23. The linker 23 launches a WWW browser 21 and passes the URL 95 received from the server 5 to the WWW browser 21.

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First Claim