Patent ID: 8272001

Claim:
A method, in a data processing system, for managing an association among at least two resources, each resource being modeled by a resource class and the association being modeled by an association class including a plurality of references to corresponding resource classes, comprising: receiving a request from a management application; identifying at least one resource object, in memory of the data processing system, instantiating each resource class referenced in the association class; creating an association object, in the memory of the data processing system, instantiating the association class for each combination of the resource objects; setting at least one association property of each association object according to dynamic characteristics of corresponding resource objects, wherein the dynamic characteristics are results of one or more first methods called on the corresponding resource objects; returning each association object to the management application; and managing, by the management application, at least one resource of the data processing system, associated with the at least one resource object, based on the at least one association property of an association object corresponding to the at least one resource, wherein setting the at least one association property of each association object comprises: evaluating at least one resource property of each resource object in the association object; and calculating the at least one association property according to a corresponding at least one resource property.