International Business Machines Corporation

James Albert Willey

Steven Victor Kauffman

Lara Marie Lewis

William J Baer

I-Ming Kao

Janet L Murray

Pedro Jacob, Jr

Jerry D Robertson

Deidra S Picciano

A flexibly adaptable, i e., configurable and/or extensible, asset management system is disclosed for processing and querying assets, representing data. The system comprises three layers: a Client Application layer, for manipulating and browsing assets, an Asset Manager Server layer, for providing programming interface services specific for assets types, such as storing, querying, and retrieving assets representing data to and from a Data Store, representing the third layer. The Asset Manager Server layer further provides communication services to support the Client Application layer and file transfer between the Client Application layer and the Asset Manager Server layer. The Asset Manager Server includes several configurable and/or extensible modules, including a Client Adapter module, a Schema Adapter module and a Resources module.

Configurable and extensible system for deploying asset management functions to client applications

A distributed client server system for managing and storing digital files includes a digital library and a shared file system, wherein the digital library further includes a library client, a library server including a library catalog, and an object server and wherein the shared file system includes a workstation with a local storage and a shared file server with a shared file storage. The digital library maintains metadata about the files in the shared file system, in a database in the library catalog. The metadata for a file includes different names for different versions of the file and a check-in status flag. A read operation is performed on the shared file system by a user retrieving a file directly from the shared file system. A write operation is performed by the user invoking a digital library application, which in turn changes the status of the flag to &ldquo;checked-out&rdquo;. When a file is &ldquo;checked-out&rdquo; it can not be edited by any other user. When the &ldquo;checked-out&rdquo; file is saved, it is saved under a new name. When a user quits after editing the file, the status of the file is changed back to &ldquo;checked-in&rdquo;.

Shared file system for digital content

An overall programming interface containing hundreds of application program interfaces (API's) for performing library functions on data objects in a digital client/server library system is simplified through a new, object oriented interface containing a small number of object oriented classes. Object instances created from the object oriented classes have member functions which are invoked by application programs, and the member functions issue appropriate calls to the API's. Information returned from the API's is handled by the calling object and provided to the application program in a simplified form.

C++ classes for a digital library

Growing community of inventors

Cupertino, CA, United States of America

James Albert Willey