Some elements in the management model have an inheritance relationship with other elements located elsewhere. For example, system properties can be defined as a child of the root domain resource, as a child of a server-group resource, as a child of the root host resource, and as a child of the server-config resource.

The resource description metadata for a resource needs to describe these relationships. It needs to cover the inheritance hierarchy, as well as how any conflicts are resolved (i.e. does the child win, as is the case with system properties and interfaces, or is some sort of merging strategy employed, as is the case with profiles and socket-binding-groups, where the sets of child resources (subsystems and socket-bindings) are merged, provided that the two sets are disjoint.

A factor to include in this metadata is whether the relationship is fixed (i.e. host system-property inherits from server-group) or whether there is some attribute that defines the inheritance (e.g. a profile's that "includes" another profile has an attribute that defines the name of the included profile.)