Patent ID: 8606548

Claim:
An energy facility control system comprising: a database configured to maintain documents that support an energy facility as collections of data objects, each of the data objects having one or more attributes that classify a type of data stored in the data object and the documents that support the energy facility including at least: a license document that defines a licensing agreement between the energy facility and a regulatory organization and includes a first collection of the data objects that are managed as discrete pieces of data separate from the license document, the first collection of the data objects representing words, at least one image, and at least one computer-aided-design drawing that make up the license document, and a design document that defines a design of at least a portion of the energy facility and includes a second collection of the data objects that are managed as discrete pieces of data separate from the design document, the second collection of the data objects representing words, at least one image, and at least one computer-aided-design drawing that make up the design document; and one or more server systems that are configured to access data stored in the database and to perform operations comprising: reusing data objects among the documents that support the energy facility, the reuse including reusing, in the license document and the design document, a first data object that includes data describing a component of the energy facility by: including the first data object in the first collection of data objects that define the license document, including the first data object in the second collection of data objects that define the design document, and maintaining, in the database, a single stored instance of the first data object that is referenced by each of the license document and the design document, the first data object representing at least one of words describing the component, an image of the component, and a computer-aided-design drawing of the component; and processing transactions related to the energy facility using the data objects as opposed to the documents, the processing including: identifying impacted data objects that are relevant to a transaction based on the one or more attributes of each of the data objects, the identified data objects being included in multiple, different documents that support the energy facility, and handling the transaction using the identified data objects without accessing all data from the multiple, different documents that support the energy facility.