Patent ID: 7483915

Claim:
A method for manipulating a plurality of discrete units of information said method comprising: generating, by an operating system, a shell and a kernel, wherein the operating system includes a database management program; generating, by the operating system, a plurality of Items wherein each Item includes Relationships to other Items; storing, by the operating system, the Items in a file system as filestreams, wherein the filestreams are managed within the context of the database management program; associating, by the operating system, each of said Items with one or more Relationships, the one or more Relationships including Holding Relationships that control the lifetime of a target Item and Embedding Relationships that enable modeling of compound Items, each one or more Relationships being between a source Item and a target Item, the target Items each having an associated reference count; determining, by the operating system, the lifetime of each target Item that has a Holding Relationship associated between the source Item and the target Item based on the associated reference count; storing, by the operating system, each target Item based on the lifetime determined from the reference count; preventing, by the operating system, a Holding Relationship between the source Item and the target Item if an Embedding Relationship currently exists between the source Item and the target Item; and exposing the Items to the shell of the operating system.