Notification platform architecture

Abstract

An architecture for a notification platform is disclosed. In one embodiment, the architecture includes a user mechanism, one or more notification sources and sinks, and a notification manager. The user mechanism stores information regarding notification parameters of a user, such as the user's default notification preferences, and may also contain, access, and/or infer contextual information. Each notification source generates notifications intended for the user, while each notification sink can provide the notifications to the user. Notification sources and sinks provide information via standardized notification schema. The notification manager is designed to appropriately convey the notifications generated by the sources to the sinks, based on information provided by the user mechanism, and by the sources and sinks. As disclosed, the architecture is applicable to entities other users as well.

1 . A computerized system comprising: 
 a mechanism designed to access and store information regarding context information and notification parameters, the notification parameters including at least one of: an automatically inferred time criticality parameter indicating time-dependent decay of the value of information contained in a notification, an automatically inferred novelty parameter that indicates whether a notification is new to a user, and an automatically inferred fidelity parameter that indicates a loss of value of a notification due to truncation and/or summarization of the information;    at least one notification source, each source designed to generate notifications;    at least one notification sink, each sink designed to receive the notifications; and,    a notification manager designed to convey the notifications generated by the at least one notification source to the at least one notification sink based on the information stored in the mechanism.    
   
   
       2 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the context information and notification parameters are for an entity.  
   
   
       3 . The system of  claim 2 , wherein the entity comprises one of a user, an agent, a process, a server, a computer, a machine, a company, an organization; a business, a computer program, a service, and a thread.  
   
   
       4 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the notifications generated by the at least one notification source are intended for an entity.  
   
   
       5 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the notifications received by the at least one sink are to be provided to an entity.  
   
   
       6 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the mechanism comprises a notification parameters store storing default notification preferences for an entity as a profile.  
   
   
       7 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the mechanism comprises a user mechanism.  
   
   
       8 . The system of  claim 7 , wherein the user mechanism comprises a user context mechanism designed to determine a current context of the user, based on at least one context source.  
   
   
       9 . The system of  claim 8 , wherein the at least one context source comprises one or more of: visual information of the user, desktop information of the user, personal-information manager (PIM) information of the user, current time and day, mobile device usage of the user, and location of the user.  
   
   
       10 . The system of  claim 8 , wherein the context mechanism is more specifically designed to determine the current context based on the at least one context source by utilizing one or more of: a statistical model, a profile, direct access of user location and activity, and real-time user specification of user state.  
   
   
       11 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the at least one notification source comprises at least one of: 
 a pull-type notification source; and    a push-type notification source.    
   
   
       12 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein each notification source has parameters associated with it representing at least one of: 
 a message class of a current notification generated by the notification source indicating a type of communication of the current notification;    a relevance of the current notification indicating a likelihood of the relevance of information contained in the current notification; and    an importance of a current notification generated by the notification source indicating value of information contained in the current notification.    
   
   
       13 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein each notification sink has parameters associated with it representing at least one of 
 a device class of the notification sink    a type of device that the notification sink is;    a transmission reliability of the notification sink indicating a likelihood that an entity will receive information contained within a notification conveyed to the notification sink;    a cost of communication of the notification sink indicating a communication cost incurred by the entity when receiving information contained within a notification conveyed to the notification sink; and,    a cost of disruption of the notification sink indicating a disruption cost incurred by the entity when receiving information contained within a notification conveyed to the notification sink.    
   
   
       14 . A computerized system comprising: 
 a user mechanism designed to store information regarding notification parameters, and comprising: 
 a user notification parameters store designed to store default notification preferences for a user and notification parameters including at least one of: an automatically inferred time criticality parameter indicating time-dependent decay of the value of information contained in a notification, an automatically inferred novelty parameter that indicates whether a user already knows the information in a notification, and an automatically inferred fidelity parameter that indicates a loss of value of a notification due to truncation of the information;  
 a user context mechanism designed to determine a current context of the user, based on at least one context source;  
   at least one notification source, each source designed to generate notifications intended for the user;    at least one notification sink, each sink designed to provide the notifications to the user; and,    a notification manager designed to convey the notifications generated by the at least one notification source to the at least one notification sink based on the information stored in the user mechanism by performing a decision-theoretic analysis.    
   
   
       15 . The system of  claim 14 , wherein the user context mechanism is more specifically designed to determine the current context based on the at least one context source by utilizing one or more of: a statistical model, a user profile, direct access of user location and activity, and real-tune user specification of user state.  
   
   
       16 . The system of  claim 14 , wherein each notification source has parameters associated with it representing at least one of: 
 an importance of a current notification generated by the notification source indicating value of information contained in the current notification to the user;    a message class of a current notification generated by the notification source indicating a type of communication of the current notification;    a relevance of the current notification indicating a likelihood of the relevance of information contained in the current notification to the user.    
   
   
       17 . The system of  claim 14 , wherein the at least one notification source comprises at least one of a pull-type notification source, and a push-type notification source.  
   
   
       18 . The system of  claim 14 , wherein each notification sink has parameters associated with it representing at least one of: 
 a device class of the notification sink indicating a type of device that the notification is;    a transmission reliability of the notification sink indicating a likelihood that the user will receive information contained within a notification conveyed to the notification sink;    a cost of communication of the notification sink indicating a communication cost incurred by the user when receiving information contained within a notification conveyed to the notification sink; and,    a cost of disruption of the notification sink indicating a disruption cost incurred by the user when receiving information contained within a notification conveyed to the 10 notification sink.    
   
   
       19 . A computer-implemented method comprising: 
 generating one or more notifications intended for a user by one or more notification sources;    receiving the one or more notifications by a notification manager;    generating contextual information by a user mechanism, the mechanism also storing information regarding notification parameters of the user, the notification parameters including at least one of: an automatically inferred time criticality parameter indicating time-dependent value of information contained in a notification, an automatically inferred novelty parameter that indicates whether a user is already aware of the contents a notification, and an automatically inferred fidelity parameter that indicates a loss of value of a notification due to summarization of the information;    receiving the contextual information by the notification manager;    determining which of the notifications to convey to which of one or more notification sinks by the notification manager, based on at least one or more of the contextual information and the information regarding the notification parameters of the user; and,    conveying the which of the notifications to the which of the one or more notification sinks by the notification manager.    
   
   
       20 . The method of  claim 19 , wherein generating the contextual information comprises generating the contextual information by a user context mechanism of the user mechanism.