Patent ID: 8090739

Claim:
A data processing system for retrieving data comprising: a non-transitory computer-readable medium; an abstract model, stored on the non-transitory computer-readable medium, and comprising a plurality of definitions of logical fields, each definition comprising a logical field name and a mapping referencing physical data, wherein at least one logical field comprises: at least a first mapping referencing data in a first physical data structure; a second mapping referencing data in a second physical data structure; and a first conditional modifier allowing the logical field to be selectably mapped to the first physical data structure using the first mapping or the second physical data structure using the second mapping, depending on the presence of the first conditional modifier in an abstract query containing the at least one logical field; a hardware processor of a computer system; and a query processor executing on the hardware processor of the computer system, and configured to convert one or more abstract queries containing logical fields configured with conditional modifiers into one or more executable queries of a given query language by referencing the abstract model.