METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CORRELATION OF INTERSECTIONS OF NETWORK RESOURCES

One particular implementation of the present invention may take the form of a method for correlating partial views of network resources into normalized or aggregated views for use by an administrator. The implementation may compare a newly detected resource against the known set of normalized resources of the network to correlate the new resource with an existing network resource. More particularly, one method for correlating network resources may compare key/value pairs associated with a new resource with key/value pairs associated with a first normalized resource. If the new resource does not correlate to the first normalized resource, the method may then compare the key/value pairs of the new resource to the key/value pairs of the second normalized resource. A second implementation may compare a unique key/value pair to a map containing the unique key/value pairs of each normalized resource, until the unique key/value pair is found. Once a normalized resource is found with the same unique key/value pair, each remaining key/value pair of the new resource may be compared with the key/value pairs of the matching normalized resource. If the key/value pairs for each resource matches, then the new resource correlates to the normalized resource.