Patent ID: 6978273

Claim:
A method of using one or more computer systems to generate a plurality of custom catalogs from a database comprising catalog data, said method comprising: executing a search of the database for each of a plurality of rule sets, each of the rule sets specifying constraints that define a scope of the catalog data comprising one of the custom catalogs, and each of the rule sets uniquely identified by a rule set identifier, said executing a search performed in accordance with constraints specified by the rule set and returning a set of search results in the form of a subset of the catalog data having the scope defined by the constraints; associating each set of search results with the identifier of the rule set used to generate them; and responding to a database query, the query specifying constraints defining a scope of the catalog data and being associated with a rule set identifier, wherein said responding further comprises: executing a search of the database in accordance with the query constraints, the search returning a set of query results in the form of a subset of the catalog data having the scope defined by the query constraints; and generating a response to the query that comprises a pared subset of the catalog data that forms the intersection between the set of query results and the set of search results associated with the same rule set identifier as associated with the query.