Patent ID: 6959268

Claim:
A computer implemented product catalog for use in a web-centric collaborative engineering environment (CEE) for providing an inter-enterprise collaborative mechanism for organizations developing and maintaining complex system products, the CEE providing a federated architecture linking multiple systems and applications together to enable collaboration among enterprise members, comprising: an object oriented database management system (ODBMS) managing an associative object model for providing a persistent understanding of product and program information, assets and tools available in the enterprise; a plurality of part objects forming a product catalog, the part objects being defined by the associative object model and stored in the ODBMS, wherein each part object has intrinsic characteristics corresponding to a plurality of default values, the product catalog providing an application independent means for supporting engineering tools through intelligent interfaces; means for generating part references, where a part reference refers to a corresponding part object in the product catalog, and wherein the part reference has characteristics customized for a project that override or extend the intrinsic characteristics of its corresponding part object; and means for linking members of the enterprise with part objects and customized part references via a collaborative engineering environment (CEE), the CEE having a framework for collaboration which provides access control, security, search mechanisms, concurrency control, versioning, information structuring, information mapping and exchange, wherein the information available to each member is information necessary for the member to complete role and team based tasks, and wherein the linking means comprises a plurality of tools, each tool communicating information with the ODBMS.