Patent ID: 7680704

Claim:
A method executed by a computer to generate in a first database system a compact item descriptor, a machine readable character string, and determine the interchangeability of two items from their compact item descriptors; the method comprising the steps: providing a first item; providing a second item; providing a classification tree as a recursive structure in the first database comprising a root parent fork with child branches to child forks with child branches or child leaves each with a set of parameters which classifies a set of items including the first item and second item where two different items that classify to the same child leaf and same parameter values are interchangeable or those that do not classify to the same child leaf and same parameter values are not interchangeable; labeling by the computer, at each fork of the classification tree, a character or sub-string of characters that distinguishes each child branch or child leaf of the fork; generating a commodity code, a character string that uniquely identifies the sequence of child branches and child leaf selected for the classification of an item represented by the child leaf, starting at the root of the classification tree with a character string representing the root and systematically appending the label representing the child branch or child leaf selected at each fork to classify the item; ordering the set of parameters for each child leaf that complete the description of an item classified at the child leaf and encoding the value for each parameter as a string of predefined length in the ordered parameter sequence so the parameter values for an item classified at the child leaf are represented as a character string; defining the compact item descriptor for an item as the commodity code for the item concatenated with the encoded parameter values for the item; generating the compact item descriptor for the first item; generating the compact item descriptor for the second item; and comparing, by the computer, the compact item descriptor for the first item with the compact item descriptor for the second item wherein if the two compact item descriptors are the same then the items are interchangeable and if the compact item descriptors are different then the items are not interchangeable.