4. The method of claim 2 , wherein each criteria of the plurality of criteria is identified and assigned a root category simultaneously.
2. A computer-implemented method for building a polyhierarchical classification of objects, comprising: a) identifying a plurality of criteria for specializing the objects based on their properties, wherein each criterion of the plurality of criteria is defined by a set of mutually exclusive attributes, wherein each attribute describes one or more properties of the objects; b) recurrently defining a root category for each criterion in terms of an attributive expression representing a logical composition of one or more attributes of criteria whose root categories have been previously defined in the recurrent sequence, or the empty attributive expression; wherein no one criterion participates in the definition of its own root category, and each attributive expression encodes a sequence of specializations by criteria so that the root category of each following criterion includes the category represented by the sequence of all previous specializations; c) storing in a computer-readable medium the plurality of criteria and their root categories in the form of attributive expressions; and d) using the stored plurality of criteria for polyhierachically structuring, updating and accessing information associated with the objects.