Patent ID: 7035860

Claim:
An article of manufacture for use in a computer system for identifying and associating appropriate actions to a selected artifact in a framework providing a customized application program, said article of manufacture comprising a computer-readable storage medium having a computer program embodied in said medium which causes the computer system to execute the method steps comprising: specifying a metamodel for a capture of relevant information pertaining to the selected artifact; implementing the metamodel as a plugin, said plugin being integratable into the framework and allowing another plugin of the framework to access the relevant information pertaining to the selected artifact; generating a collection artifact containing an empty instantiation of the metamodel in which an instantiation of the metamodel may be stored; sending, from the framework, the collection artifact to a target platform wherein the sending of the collection artifact to the target platform is performed by a communicating plugin responsible for communicating to other platforms and for retrieving artifacts from those other platforms; instantiating, on the target platform, the collection artifact containing an instance of the selected artifact, each instantiation of the selected artifact instance containing attributes characteristics, and a replica of the selected artifact's content; transmitting the instantiated collection artifact back to the framework; and analyzing the selected artifact's attributes and characteristics contained in the instantiated collection artifact to ascertain appropriate access and actions allowed on the selected artifact.