1. A data management system for managing a plurality of objects, the system comprising: a computing device that has at least one processing unit that executes a data management system; at least one storage unit that is coupled to the computing device; the at least one storage unit comprises an embedded extended markup language (XML) database that contains one or more types of cell specific data containers each of which contains heterogeneous types of content stored as XML documents; wherein each cell specific data container comprises one or more pieces of information linked with the cell specific data container wherein the one or more pieces of information are stored in a native XML format; and wherein each piece of information in each cell specific data container is based on an abstract base type object having one or more general characteristics elements of an object including an ItemID element that specifies a unique item identifier and a KindID element that specifies a unique identifier that identifies a type of the content and one or more semantic property elements, and a plurality of base components, each base component being a child of the abstract base type object and inheriting the one or more general characteristics and one or more semantic properties, each base component being a container item kind that describes a type of object and encapsulates the particular type of object wherein each type of object associated with the system is represented by the abstract base type object and one of the base components.