Efficiently describing relationships between resources

A method to discover a plurality of relationships between a source resource and a plurality of target resources, the plurality of relationships encoded in a format independent of an encoding of the source resource or the plurality of target resources, the method comprising:

• locating the source resource where a relationship originates, and locating a related target resource where the relationship terminates;
• determining whether a relationship data structure comprising hierarchy-structured relationship information is associated with the located source resource, wherein determining whether the relationship data structure is associated with the source resource further comprises:
• checking for an existence of a subfolder at a location of the source resource, wherein the subfolder stores source resource metadata and is located at an address relative to the location of the source resource;
• decoding the plurality of relationships without decoding the source resource or the related target resource, wherein decoding the plurality of relationships without decoding the source resource further comprises:
• prior to decoding the plurality of relationships, determining a schema of the relationship data structure identified by a namespace associated with the relationship data structure and
• utilizing the schema to decode the plurality of relationships stored in the relationship data structure;
• and
• displaying the plurality of relationships.

A computer-storage medium storing a relationship data structure that provides data corresponding to a plurality of relationships between a source resource and a plurality of target resources, the relationship data structure comprises:

• identification information to uniquely identify each relationship of the plurality of relationships;
• target information for each identified relationship to specify a location of each target resource of the plurality of target resources where a relationship terminates, which is related to the source resource where the relationship originates, wherein the plurality of identified relationships stored in the relationship data structure are nested;
• semantic information to assist a decoder when decoding the identified relationship of the plurality of relationships, wherein content encoding format of the plurality of relationships differs from the source resource content encoding format and the plurality of target resources content encoding formats, and the plurality of relationships can be decoded without decoding the source resource or any of the plurality of target resources;
• and
• a relationship data structure comprising one or more relationship tags to define the identified relationship between the source resource and the target resource, wherein each of the one or more relationship tags comprise an identification element, a type element, and a target element.