Automated Spiritual Research, Reflection, and Community System and Method

Abstract

A computerized system and method are presented that provide access to three data collections that can form the foundations of a spiritual journey, namely a research archive for researching fundamental texts of a variety of spiritual and religious domains, a personal reflection data collection for reflecting upon a personal life journey, and a community conversation data collection that provides users with an opportunity to explore the research archive and their personal reflections in a social community setting. The research archive is oriented around ideas having snippets from the fundamental texts. The various elements in the data collections are associated with life issue tags and religious or spiritual domains. By analyzing a user's selected domain or the domain of displayed content, and by analyzing the life issue tag associated with displayed content, the system and method can suggest related content from elsewhere in the data collections.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A server computing machine for spiritual research, reflection, and sharing comprising:
 a) a network interface providing data and a user interface to a remote computing device over a computerized network;   b) a processor that is controlled via programming instructions;   c) a non-transitory computer readable memory;   d) database programming stored on the non-transitory computer readable memory and performed by the processor, the database programming managing a database that is transformed during operation by the database programming, the database programming managing:
 i) an archive database having:
 (1) a plurality of idea database entities each having an excerpt from a spiritual document and at least one commentary about that excerpt; 
 (2) a plurality of life issue tag database entities each having a life issue tag that identifies a life issue; 
 (3) relationships between the idea database entities and the life issue tag database entities; 
 
 ii) a personal reflections book database having
 (1) a plurality of user database entities each having information about and identifying a user, 
 (2) a plurality of book contribution database entities each having personal reflections book content, and 
 (3) relationships between the user database entities and the book contribution database entities; 
 
 iii) a spiritual community database having:
 (1) a plurality of community database entities each having information about a community; 
 (2) relationships between the community database entities and the user database entities defining membership in the communities; 
 (3) a plurality of community contribution database entities each having a community contribution; 
 (4) relationships between the community database entities and the community contribution database entities identifying the community for contributions.