Abstract: A relationship data structure associated with a source resource enables methods to discover and describe relationships between the source resource and a plurality of target resources. The relationships are stored in a format independent of the encoding of the source resource. Each relationship between the source resource and the plurality of target resources is stored in a content-neutral format, and the relationship data structure stores, a location of each target resource, a type of relationship with each target resource and an identifier to uniquely identify each relationship between the source resource and each target resource. Accordingly, the relationship data structure allows a decoder to directly discover the relationships between the source resource and the plurality of target resources without decoding the source resource or target resources.

Abstract: The present invention is directed to a system and method for providing access to individual resources stored within a package. The system enables a client to access the resources without having to access the entire package. The system allows a client to reference the different resources within the package through use of a URI scheme. The URI scheme of the present invention is composed through a method of combining the URI for the package and the URI for the resource. The URI scheme of the present invention is able to work with any scheme, thereby enabling the URI scheme to be universal and not protocol-specific.