Patent ID: 8458672

Claim:
A computer implemented method for facilitating utilization of data, the computer implemented method comprising: receiving data, wherein the received data is in a first representation, and wherein the first representation is an instance of a data object; converting the received data from the first representation to a common representation, wherein the common representation is mapped to the first representation using an external configuration file that stores instructions for constructing an implementation of the data object and comprises a set of handlers and a mapping method, wherein each handler of the set of handlers is associated with a type for the common representation, and wherein the common representation comprises name-value pairs that are dynamically extracted from the instance of the data object, and wherein the mapping method provides a mapping between the type and an external value that identifies the data object, and wherein converting the received data from the first representation to the common representation comprises determining a type of the data object, identifying parameters for the determined type of the data object, retrieving the identified parameters from the instance of the data object and converting the identified parameters to the name-value pairs to provide the common representation; and outputting the common representation of the data to facilitate utilization of the data.