I may not understand your situation exactly, but I think you are going down the wrong path.
The Collection and Map interfaces are used for different purposes. The List and Set interfaces inherit from Collection and are used for ordered items and non-duplicate items respectively. Some concrete implementations of List are LinkedList and ArrayList. Some concrete implementations of Set are HashSet and TreeSet.
The Map interface associates items with key values (which is what you want). Some concrete implementations of Map are HashMap and TreeMap. I think you may want to use TreeMap. Here is the API:
http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/docs/api/java/util/TreeMap.html [ August 20, 2003: Message edited by: Matthew Son ]