The present invention relates to a method and system for electronic management
of data, which can be represented in a directed graph according to an entity relationship
model. Any entity relationship model compliant data pool, and particular a (web)
catalog is structured by grouping catalog pages (nodes) into groups (node types)
with similar properties like attributes and relationships. Catalog nodes are identified
by the node type name and a node instance name that is unique for a given node
type. The node type definition is advantageously enabled to be business-driven.
A prior art entity relationship diagram describes the structure of the catalog
by defining the node types, the node attributes and the possible relationships,
and optionally access control information. The catalog structure is stored in the
database in a separate set of structure tables. This set of tables is used by the
inventive, generic catalog maintenance tool to customize itself by validating the
user input using the structure definition stored in said structure tables.
