Patent ID: 8352453

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for measuring compliance with one or more compliance standards, comprising: generating and storing execution plan metadata based at least in part on one or more compliance rules of a plurality of compliance rules; storing compliance-specific target results, wherein for each target of a plurality of targets, said compliance-specific target results include a result subset of target-specific compliance results for a rule subset of the plurality of compliance rules, each target-specific compliance result of said result subset including a compliance value representing compliance to a respective compliance rule of said rule subset; wherein each target of said plurality of targets is a computer resource, and wherein at least one of said plurality of targets is a first composite target that includes two or more member targets; based at least in part on the execution plan metadata, generating an execution plan for generating data that measures compliance to a first compliance standard, wherein generating an execution plan includes: for each target-specific compliance result of said compliance-specific target results, generating an execution plan step for computing the compliance value of the respective compliance rule of the respective target; and wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.