Patent ID: 7827180

Claim:
A method for assigning identities to content portions, the method comprising: receiving a content portion; determining if the content portion has an assigned content identifier; if the content portion has an assigned content identifier: applying the assigned content identifier to the content portion received to allow processing of that content portion using the assigned content identifier; identifying a persistence metric associated with the content identifier that is assigned to the content portion; receiving a persistence signal indicating a level of persistence to be associated with the content portion; and determining that the persistence metric is not equivalent to the persistence signal, and in response, resetting the persistence metric associated with the content identifier for the received content portion to the persistence signal; if the content portion does not have an assigned content identifier: selecting an unassigned content identifier, from a set of unassigned content identifiers, for assignment to the content portion; assigning the selected unassigned content identifier to the content portion so that the unassigned content identifier becomes an assigned content identifier in a set of assigned content identifiers; and associating a persistence metric to the assigned content identifier, the persistence metric indicating an importance of longevity of the assignment between the content portion and the content identifier; wherein the persistence metric associated with assigned content identifiers comprises: at least one permanent persistence metric indicating that an assignment between an assigned content identifier and a content portion is to be preserved during a recover operation to unassign content identifiers; and wherein the content is in an extensible markup language format and wherein the content identifier is a QNAME.