Patent ID: 8156213

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, with a computing device, a first schema to be used for controlling generation of configuration data for a first version of a device in a device family; receiving, with the computing device, a second, different schema to be used for controlling generation of configuration data for a second, different version of the device in the device family; automatically identifying, with a software utility executed by the computing device, differences between the first schema and the second schema, wherein automatically identifying differences between the first schema and the second schema comprises processing the first schema and the second schema with a software utility that automatically identifies a modified element of the second schema, wherein the modified element of the second schema corresponds to a corresponding element of the first schema, wherein the modified element of the second schema comprises an element name, wherein the corresponding element of the first schema comprises the same element name, and wherein at least a portion of the modified element is different than a corresponding portion of the corresponding element; and automatically merging, with the software utility, the first schema and the second schema to produce a resulting merged schema to be used for controlling generation of configuration data for both the first version of the device and the second version of the device according to the identified differences between the first schema and the second schema, wherein the resulting merged schema expresses the identified differences between the first schema and the second schema and includes a single instance of each common portion between the first schema and the second schema, wherein automatically merging the first schema and the second schema comprises automatically adding the modified element to the resulting merged schema and generating the resulting merged schema with the software utility to include an indicator that the modified element is available for the second version of the device, that the at least portion corresponds to the second version of the device, that the modified element is available for the first version of the device, and that the corresponding portion corresponds to the first version of the device.