These patents (5,729,730, 6,151,604, 6,163,775, and 6,182,121) are a group and are interesting to Linux because they describe an object-oriented management layer that resides on top of an hierarchically-organized set of data. The patents apply to data management (that potentially enable a disconnected management layer to reside on top of databases, file systems, XML and operating system components), search engine marketing (that potentially enable the required joining of orthogonal sets of data at the keyword level) and (document management (that potentially enable features such as branching, merging, user-level document control and multi-authored documents).