The invention described herein is an apparatus for accessing an information repository, including computer readable program code stored on computer readable media, where the computer readable program code includes code for organizing information stored in the information repository into a hierarchy. The hierarchy is a hierarchy of a number of derived containers that are generated in conformance with an information model which is a hierarchy of container definition nodes. Each of the derived containers corresponds to a different one of the container definition nodes, represents a category of information in the information repository, and has contents which can be other derived containers and/or information extracted from the information repository.