International Business Machines Corporation

John Mark Hartel

John Conrad Sanchez

Richard Walton Ragan, Jr

Karalee Brown LeBlanc

Gary Louis Macomber

Rob P Lowe

A family of Java interfaces defines methods to provide common information about a property, such as data type and editing capabilities. The interfaces identify the methods used to get generic metadata. Implementers may extend these classes, as needed, to provide the metadata for their specific properties. The common metadata description interface of the present invention allows multiple metadata sources to be used interchangeably within the same software product without the software code being specifically written for each metadata source.

Open framework for the definition of metadata

A user-interactive display interface implementation for building structured software program statements and, particularly, such structured statements which may serve as search queries to databases including a plurality of display rows together with means enabling the entry of program terms into each of said rows. A template is vertically movable to each of said rows and includes a template row of indicators, each defining a type of program term enabled to be positioned in said row coincident with said indicator. There are a plurality of user-activatable menus of selectable terms, each menu respectively associated with one of said indicators. The selectable terms in each of the menus are respectively of the term type enabled to be positioned coincident with the associated indicator. Then, for editing purposes, there is selection of one of said indicators to thereby display the menu associated with the selected indicator.

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Austin, TX, United States of America

John Mark Hartel