Patent ID: 7072956

Claim:
A computing device comprising: one or more processors; memory operably associated with the one or more processors; one or more applications loadable in the memory and executable on the one or more processors; and the one or more processors being configured to: receive context information from externally of the device, the context information pertaining to one or more current device contexts; automatically determine one or more current contexts from the context information using one or more hierarchical traversable tree structures, wherein the tree structures comprise individual nodes individual ones of which being associated with a context, wherein said one or more current contexts are determined by traversing at least one node on at least one of the tree structures, wherein individual nodes comprise an entity identification (EID) that is unique to the node, EIDs serving as a basis by which attributes can be assigned to goods or services associated with an individual node; locally evaluate a collection of policies in connection with the one or more current contexts to provide a resultant set of policies; and enforce the resultant set of policies on the one or more applications.