Patent ID: 7421445

Claim:
A computer-readable storage medium configured to store hierarchically-organized data in a non-hierarchical format, said hierarchically-organized data having at least a first node at a first level and a plurality of second nodes at a second level, the second nodes being child nodes of the first node, the first and second nodes each having a corresponding data item associated therewith, the hierarchically-organized data comprising: a plurality of rows each having a plurality of fields, each of said rows corresponding to a data item associated with a one of the first and second nodes, the fields of each row comprising: a first field which stores the data item associated with the one of the nodes that corresponds to the row; and a second field which stores a position identifier which identifies the level at which the node that corresponds to the row is located in the hierarchically-organized data, and which comprises information from which can be identified the relative left-to-right position of the node that corresponds to the row as compared with other nodes at the same level as the node that corresponds to the row, and which further indicates one of: (a) an identity of an ancestor node of the node that corresponds to the row, or (b) the fact that the node that corresponds to the row has no ancestor, each position identifier including a bit length field, a plurality of ordinal length fields, and a corresponding plurality of ordinal value fields, wherein the bit length field is indicative of the aggregate number of bits present in the plurality of ordinal length fields and the corresponding plurality of ordinal value fields; wherein the position identifier corresponds to the location of the row of the node and the relative left-to-right location of the node; whereby position of a given node is determined by a corresponding position identifier.