System, method and article of manufacture for providing an attribute system with primitive support of dynamic and evolvable roles in support of fluid and integrative application development

DETAILED DESCRIPTION A system, method and article of manufacture are provided for managing data items.
One or more roles are defined with each role comprising a set of attributes.
The roles may then be then associated with zero, one, or more data items.
The data item may be assigned a value for each of the attributes of the role(s) that have been associated with the data item.
In one aspect of the present invention, the set of attributes of a role may comprise one or more attributes.
In an additional aspect of the present invention, roles may have one or more attributes in common with each other.
The data item may also have one or more attributes not included in the set of attributes of the role(s) associated with the data item.
In another aspect of the present invention, the data item may have at least one attribute associated with it prior to the associating of the one or more roles to the data item.
Also, the associating of one or more roles to the data item may further include the making of a determination as to whether the data item has one or more attributes in common with the set of attributes of the role.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the addition of one or more attributes to the data item may be permitted subsequent to the assigning of the role to the data item.
In a further embodiment, the creating of an alias for at least one of the attributes of the set of attributes of the role may be permitted.
In another embodiment of the present invention, the values assigned to the data item may be stored in a database.
In such an embodiment, the values of all of the attributes of a role may be retrieved from the database upon receipt of a query for one of the attributes of the respective role.