Patent ID: 8391309

Claim:
A human-friendly method for managing a plurality of resources comprising: associating one or more of a plurality of integer encoding values with each of the plurality of resources, wherein the plurality of resources comprise channels or channel groups of a communication network; defining operator provisioned attribute mask bit patterns from a set of possible resource attribute mask bit patterns to be associated with each of the plurality of resources; associating each of the defined attribute mask bit patterns that represents a resource attribute mask of interest to a service operator with a unique mnemonic symbol from among a plurality of unique mnemonic symbols, wherein one or more of the plurality of unique mnemonic symbols associated with multiple-attribute bit patterns correspond to only one direction of transmission over a channel; and provisioning a requested service over one or more of the resources, to a requesting device based on a result of a comparison of the one or more attribute mask bit patterns that correspond to the integer encoding value, or values, of the resources over which the requested service is being provisioned in order to designate the resources as suitable for a particular application service associated with the requested service with an associated prerequisite resource requirement.