Patent ID: 7716191

Claim:
A method of setting a categorization for a digital asset in a distributed computing environment, the method comprising: (a) receiving, from a first computing device, an asset identification tag and a first taxonomy tag having a first categorization associated with a digital asset; (b) receiving, from a second computing device, the asset identification tag and a second taxonomy tag having a second categorization associated with the digital asset; (c) comparing a first policy associated with the first taxonomy tag and a second policy associated with the second taxonomy tag; (d) selecting, based in part on a result of the comparison of the first and second policy, one of the first taxonomy tag and the second taxonomy tag to associate with the digital asset as the active taxonomy tag, wherein selecting one of the first taxonomy tag and the second taxonomy tag to associate with the digital asset as the active taxonomy tag includes: unionizing the first taxonomy tag received from the first computing device and the second taxonomy tag received from the second computing device to form a unionized taxonomy tag as the active taxonomy tag, the first taxonomy tag and the second taxonomy tag being present within the unionized taxonomy tag, ranking the first policy relative to the second policy, and identifying (i) the first categorization of the first taxonomy tag as the categorization of the digital asset when the first policy is ranked ahead of the second policy and (ii) the second categorization of the second taxonomy tag as the categorization of the digital asset when the second policy is ranked ahead of the first policy; (e) deleting the first taxonomy tag from the first computing device and saving, on the first computing device, the unionized taxonomy tag as the active taxonomy tag associated with the digital asset in place of the first taxonomy tag; and (f) deleting the second taxonomy tag from the second computing device and saving, on the second computing device, the unionized taxonomy tag as the active taxonomy tag associated with the digital asset in place of the second taxonomy tag.