Patent 5,946,647 (filed on February 1, 1996) seems to cover automatically scanning/recognizing data, creating links for identified data and then providing a way to act on those links. It sounds similar to contemporary technology that created HTML archives from email which scanned data and created http and mailto: links which were then acted on by browser and email clients. Hypermail is one package that did this and was initially released on July 30, 1994.
Ref: http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/archives/WWW-TALK/www-talk-1994q...