Patent ID: 8135750

Claim:
A method to describe a plurality of relationships between a source resource and a plurality of target resources, the plurality of relationships encoded in a format independent of an encoding of the source resource, the method comprising: selecting a namespace that defines a relationship schema between an encrypted source resource where the relationship originates and at least one related encrypted target resource from a plurality of target resources where the relationship terminates, wherein the relationship schema is encoded in a format that is independent of the encrypted source resource's encoding and the at least one related encrypted target resource from a plurality of target resources' encoding, wherein the relationship schema can be decoded without decoding the encrypted source resource or the at least one related encrypted target resource; storing the encrypted source resource, the relationship schema, and the at least one related encrypted target resource in a package; populating a relationship data structure based on the plurality of relationships and the relationship schema; storing the plurality of relationships in the relationship data structure; and associating the relationship data structure with the encrypted source resource, wherein associating the relationship data structure with the encrypted source resource comprises: creating a container at a location relative to the encrypted source resource; and storing the relationship data structure in the container.