A system and method that provide resilient watermarking of digital data, including numeric and categorical relational data. The method and system are premised upon a framework considering the higher level semantics to be preserved in the original data. The system and method also provides a technique for enabling user-level run-time control over the properties that are to be preserved, as well as the degree of change introduced. The system and method are resilient to various important classes of attacks, including subset selection, addition, alteration, or resorting, horizontal or vertical data partitioning, and attribute remapping. For numeric relational data, approximately 40-45% of the embedded watermark may survive approximately 45-50% of original data loss, while for categorical relational data, the watermark may survive approximately 80% of original data loss with only approximately 25% degradation of the watermark.