Patent ID: 7555503

Claim:
A method of maintaining a catalog based on a reference electronic catalog, the method comprising: providing a reference catalog that has a reference format and a plurality of items, with each item having associated characteristics stored in one or more data fields associated with the item, wherein the reference catalog is not a list of pointers to data access structures that are used to control access to data; maintaining the reference catalog with updates and revisions to the items and associated characteristics; establishing a second catalog format for a second catalog; mapping at least a portion of the items and associated characteristics of the reference catalog into the second format to create the second catalog; maintaining, independently of maintaining the reference catalog, the second catalog by repeating the mapping of at least a portion of the reference catalog into the second catalog after maintaining the reference catalog, wherein the second catalog format may be different than the reference format; and recording the time of each maintenance of the reference catalog and recording the time of each maintenance of the second catalog and wherein maintaining the second catalog comprises comparing the recorded times and mapping only portions of the reference catalog that have been maintained into the second catalog.