Patent ID: 8719253

Claim:
A method comprising: defining a hierarchical tree at a platform independent application layer comprising target nodes, policy nodes, class nodes, and feature nodes, wherein the feature nodes are associated with shape, and wherein the feature nodes comprise linked lists of features; identifying each target node, policy node, and class node with a unique id comprising a target id, a tree level, and a policy id, wherein the unique node id comprises a dotted decimal notation, and wherein the dotted decimal notation comprises numbers representative of at least a target id, a level, and a policy id; identifying each feature node with a non-unique id; creating a target index table; creating a class index table, wherein the class index table is a multi-level hash table, and wherein each bucket of the hash table comprises an AVL tree of class nodes associated with that index and level; creating a policy index table; receiving a search string requesting a desired node comprising: a target parameter, a policy parameter, and a class parameter; retrieving the desired node id based on referencing at least one parameter to at least one index table; determining a level of the desired node based on the desired node id; retrieving the desired node based on the desired node id and determined level; and configuring the desired node.