Patent ID: 8275717

Claim:
A system to provide attributes of a vehicle available in an inventory to a plurality of different venues for providing vehicle information, each venue associated with a respective venue entity, the system comprising: a vehicle data record stored on a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium, the vehicle data record comprising a plurality of source-attribute pairs, each source-attribute pair comprising an attribute value corresponding to the vehicle and identifying a respective source of the attribute value; a plurality of availability rules stored on a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium specifying which of the plurality of venues are to have available attribute values associated with attribute value sources, wherein the availability rules are based upon business relationships between the venue entity and the attribute value sources, wherein a business relationship comprises one of a sponsored dealer and a manufacturer of the vehicle and a dealer group and a manufacturer of the vehicle; a computing device comprising an augmentation manager and an assignment manager; the augmentation manager configured to access a vehicle style database comprising a plurality of vehicle styles, each vehicle style comprising a plurality of reference attribute values shared by vehicles of a particular vehicle style, to select one of the vehicle styles in the vehicle style database using the vehicle data record, and to augment the vehicle data record with source-attribute pairs derived from the selected vehicle style; and an assignment manager operating on a computing device and configured to provide vehicle information to a first one of the plurality of venues by, accessing the augmented vehicle data record and the availability rules, applying the availability rules to the augmented vehicle data record to identify source-attribute pairs of the augmented vehicle data record that are from sources available to the first venue according to the availability rules, and providing a first set of attribute values to the first venue, the first set comprising attribute values of the identified source-attribute pairs.