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Abstract

Embodiments of the present invention provide an abstraction for the representation of a network device's configuration and management data that is not tied to a particular protocol or network device implementation but is, instead, an original, general format used as source for producing multiple, alternate and/or equivalent representations that exist and occur simultaneously within a system of network devices. Other embodiments of the invention utilize XML abstraction as the input to a system of software code generators that can produce application programming interfaces used to communicate and manage network devices that support specific management protocols and representations. Another embodiment of the invention is the result of generalizing an existing, but specific, representation of a network device's configuration and management data so that the newly-generalized format can be repurposed and provide alternate, additional but equivalent representations of the original, specific network device configuration and management information.

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First Claim