Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput – Computer-to-computer protocol implementing
Reexamination Certificate
2000-05-19
2004-08-03
Wiley, David (Department: 2143)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput
Computer-to-computer protocol implementing
C709S227000, C709S219000, C709S203000, C719S330000, C719S328000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06772216
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to data communication between software applications in a distributed computer network such as the Internet. In particular, this invention provides an interaction protocol for enabling process communications among network-distributed software applications, particularly, but not exclusively, among applications having dissimilar platforms, language dependencies or vendor dependencies.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Business entities have long recognized that substantial productivity and marketing benefits may potentially arise from conducting commercial business activities and business processes over distributed computer networks. In order for a business to achieve the full benefits of network-based commercial activity, the firm's existing commerce-related or business process software application systems must communicate both among each other and with the application systems of other business entities. However, it is often the case that software applications within an organization or among different business entities cannot easily exchange data because they may be built on disparate operating systems or use a variety of internally developed and third-party software that employ diverse programming languages. The inability to exchange data between application programs is sometimes referred to in the relevant literature as the lack of application interoperability. Earlier efforts at business-to-business commerce activity were led by Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) applications. EDI-based commercial activities worked well for certain applications such as order processing and payment exchange, but failed to make significant progress in other types of applications. File and information transfers in an EDI-based network were often performed using multiple communications protocols, requiring expensive application programming development or changes to existing systems in order to achieve a collaborative environment. Because of a lack of any universal data interchange formats, companies were, and still are, often prevented from exploiting their own enterprise systems integration or legacy systems to reach external partner applications.
In recent years, the Internet distributed computer network has developed the infrastructure and data communications protocols to connect all businesses to each other regardless of their size, geographic location or position in the supply chain. Networked distributed computer systems may be configured as intranets, extranets or publicly available systems using Internet technologies. Internet technologies provide business entities with another opportunity to achieve substantial productivity gains and marketing benefits by conducting internal, business-to-consumer and business-to-business Internet-based commercial activities among employees, and with customers, vendors, suppliers and other parties related to their business enterprises. Internet-based commercial activities, referred to generally as “electronic commerce”, “e-commerce”, or “e-business” include, but are not limited to, all types of business processes that can take place in a secure manner online, as well as the more traditional buying and selling of goods and services. The Internet environment holds out the promise of true collaborative data exchange and software application interoperability for business firms of all sizes. However, the promise is not yet fully a reality. The deployment of disparate computer systems, operating systems, and collections of operational data in an Internet environment for the purpose of collaborative processing and data exchange presents complex challenges to the successful implementation of e-commerce activities.
The primary Internet technological environment for commercial activities is the World Wide Web (the “Web”) which predominantly uses Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) as the standard application-layer interaction protocol and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) as the standard document authoring language. (Note that a glossary of terms related to the Internet and relevant to this description is provided in the Appendix at the end of this disclosure.) Software tools and techniques currently available for designing and implementing Web-based commercial applications, such as HTML, CGI scripts, Java applets, JavaScript and browser plug-ins, provide Web authors and commercial sites with an array of techniques for displaying data content in a visually compelling and informative manner. However, these tools and techniques alone do not yet have the capabilities necessary to support sophisticated commercial transaction processing in a Web-based environment and do not fully address the application interoperability problem. For example, HTTP, the predominant application interaction protocol, is not extensible and cannot easily support the dynamic integration of application services without additional software interface development.
Standardization efforts toward addressing the problems of Internet- and Web-based application interoperability include industry consortia and vendor-specific e-commerce solutions. A recent new data representation standard, Extensible Markup Language (XML), was adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium in February, 1998. In its broadest sense, XML is a system for defining, validating, and sharing document formats on the Web, providing a universal format for structured documents and data. XML is a markup language for presenting documents on the Web that uses tags to identify data components, in a manner similar to HTML. However, XML is potentially more versatile than HTML because of its extensibility in defining specific subject matter domains of markup tags. Document Type Definitions (DTDs), referred to as dictionaries, vocabularies, or schemas, serve as a uniform source of data definitions for specific industries or fields of knowledge, making it easier to exchange data not only within an organization but also among different companies. Unlike HTML, XML is an extensible standard because users may define their own electronic document type in the form of a DTD. The simple language syntax makes it easy to process by machine while remaining understandable to people. XML style sheets, called XSLs, describe how the tagged data in an XML program should be displayed. Further information about XML and the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, can be found at the W3C Web site, http://www.w3c.org.
XML is in use in several industries, and forms the basis of several standardization efforts. In the financial industry, for example, J.P. Morgan & Co. Inc. and Price Waterhouse Coopers recently proposed an XML dictionary called FpML (Financial products Markup Language), which would standardize XML tags in areas such as fixed income derivatives and foreign currency exchange. The Internet Open Trading Protocol, Open Buying on the Internet, and RosettaNet have published non-proprietary XML-based standards for use in conducting various types of e-commerce over the Internet. And private vendors are also implementing XML based e-commerce solutions. Some of these standards as they relate to XML-based protocols are briefly discussed here.
The Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP) provides an interoperable framework for Internet commerce that is both payment system independent and optimized for the case where the buyer and the merchant do not have a prior acquaintance. It supports several standard Internet payment systems (e.g., CyberCash, DigiCash, etc.). IOTP is intended to handle cases where such merchant roles as the shopping site, the payment handler, the deliverer of goods or services, and the provider of customer support are performed by one party (i.e., Internet site) or by different parties. IOTP describes the content, format and sequences of messages that pass among the participants, referred to as Trading Roles, in an electronic trade. IOTP defines five different types of Trading Roles (Consumer, Merchant, Payment Handler, Delivery Handler, and Merchant Customer Care Provider) that are
Ankireddipally Lakshmi Narasimha
Yeh Ryh-Wei
Avellino Joseph E
Hickman Palermo & Truong & Becker LLP
Holmes Craig G.
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Truong Bobby K.
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