ITEM, RELATION, ATTRIBUTE: THE IRA OBJECT MODEL

A system and method for providing a document object model to represent components of related entities for in-memory representations. The system and method provide for tangled data structures that are more readily parsed than conventional object models. Data is represented as items, relations and attributes. Items are described in terms of relations and attributes. Relations represent item associations. While attributes, represent other information about items. The present invention solves the problems associated with representing an XML document as a DOM component. The DOM component does not allow for relations of text with elements.