Patent ID: 7346621

Claim:
A method in a computer system for determining attribute values of attributes of objects, the method comprising: providing types, each type having a type-specific attribute; identifying objects, each object associated with a type; for each of the types, identifying relationships for that type between the objects associated with that type; and identifying relationships for that type between an object associated with that type and an object associated with other types; for each of the types, calculating a value for the attribute of the object based on the identified relationships using function for each type that calculates the attribute value for that type, wherein the function is defined as F i =F i R i +Σ j≠i F j R ji where F i represents the attribute value associated with object i, R i represents intra-type relationships between objects of the type of the object i, and R ji represents inter-type relationships between objects of the type of the object i and other types j; and storing the calculated values.