A relationship data structure associated with a source resource enables methods to discover and describe relationships between the source resource and a plurality of target resources. The relationships are stored in a format independent of the encoding of the source resource. Each relationship between the source resource and the plurality of target resources is stored in a content-neutral format,and the relationship data structure stores, a location of each target resource, a type of relationship with each target resource and an identifier to uniquely identify each relationship between the source resource and each target resource. Accordingly, the relationship data structure allows a decoder to directly discover the relationships between the source resource and the plurality of target resources without decoding the source resource or target resources.