Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, has announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued United States Patent number 6,938,046. The patent, titled "Polyarchical Data Indexing and Automatically Generated Hierarchical Data Indexing Paths", covers Factiva Intelligent Indexing--the Factiva Industry, Region, and Subject Taxonomy and Factiva Company Taxonomy which is applied to all of the content, in all formats and languages, in Factiva's business news information services.

Factiva Intelligent Indexing is a method of data categorization, using polyarchical indexing codes and automatically generated expansion paths, for future searching and information retrieval. It involves applying a code, which relates to a subject matter, to a particular document. The codes are then linked with the categories created to represent various subject matters. In order to search for those Factiva documents that contain content in a particular category, Factiva's search applications can retrieve all documents containing the code linked for that category.

(www.factiva.com)