Patent ID: 8055544

Claim:
A system to determine the availability of attributes of a vehicle in an inventory in a plurality of different venues for providing vehicle information, comprising: a network server, comprising; a computer-readable storage medium to store a vehicle record comprising a plurality of source attribute pairs corresponding to the vehicle in the inventory, wherein each source attribute pair comprises an attribute value pertaining to the vehicle in the inventory and specifies a source of the attribute value, wherein two or more of the attribute values are of different sources; the computer-readable storage medium further comprising entries representing each of the plurality of venues, each venue associated with a respective venue entity and comprising a plurality of availability rules specifying sources of the source attribute pairs that are available to the venue, wherein the availability rules are based upon business relationships between the venue entity and the attribute value sources, wherein a business relationship between a venue entity and a source of an attribute value is one of a sponsored dealer and a manufacturer of the vehicle and a dealer group and a manufacturer of the vehicle; and an assignment manager communicatively coupled to the computer-readable storage medium and configured to select a first set of the plurality of attribute values of the plurality of source attribute pairs of the vehicle record to be available to a first one of the plurality of venues based upon availability rules of the first venue and the source of the respective source attribute pairs of the vehicle record, and to select a second set of the plurality of attribute values of the same plurality of source attribute pairs in the same vehicle record to be available to a second one of the plurality of venues based upon availability rules of the second venue and the source of the respective source attribute pairs, wherein the first set includes one or more attribute values that are not included in the second set.