System and method for sharing information among provider systems

• US 20060041618A1
• Filed: 07/29/2003
• Published: 02/23/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 08/14/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Mymove LLC
• Original Assignee: Imagitas Incorporated (Red Ventures LLC)
• Inventors: Chang, Kae-por F.
• Granted Patent: US 8,010,605 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/205
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/51 Discovery or management thereof, e.g. service location protocol [SLP] or web services

Abstract

A system is provided wherein information is provided once, and that information is provided to multiple provider systems. Information provided by a user is stored and implemented for each provider as needed. The information is provided by a user to a central server that distributes the information to one or more provider systems. In particular, the information is stored in a database and distributed to the provider system depending on the type of transaction. According to one aspect, the information is stored in an unstructured format in the database. In some embodiments the information contains metatags or indicators that can be parsed by a parser to extract the data content from the desired data fields.

Claims

1. A method for providing services by a service provider to a customer, comprising:

providing to the customer a list of service providers or services;

receiving from the customer an identifier of the service provider with which the customer wishes to transact;

receiving from the customer a plurality of customer data objects corresponding to check-out data objects used by the service provider to provide services;

placing the customer data objects into a check-out data construct comprising information identifying the customer, information identifying the service provider, customer data corresponding to the data objects and tag information identifying the customer data; and

providing the service provider with the check-out data objects used by the service provider to provide services.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the act of placing the customer data objects into a check-out data construct further comprises inserting prefix and suffix meta tags that can be parsed by a parser.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising parsing the check-out data construct using a parser to extract information corresponding to the customer data objects.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the act of placing the customer data objects into a check-out data construct comprises placing the customer data objects into a relational database.

5. A system for sharing customer data with a service provider, comprising:

a database in which a plurality of customer data objects are stored, each customer data object including content and tags indicative of the content;

a tag parser that parses the tags to determine the content of the customer data objects; and

an information manager operable to provide the data object content to the service provider to allow the service provider to provide services to the customer.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein the data parser is an XML parser and the tags are XML tags.

7. The system of claim 5, wherein the database is a relational database.

8. The system of claim 5, wherein the data objects are stored in an unstructured format including the content and the tags.