Patent ID: 7359942

Claim:
An information processing apparatus for processing transmission of a message, said apparatus comprising: a gateway operable to provide a local message exchange interface with a plurality of local sites of a system; a B2B connector operable to provide a message exchange interface between the system and a plurality of sites external to the system; a message translator operable to perform conversion between any two of a plurality of message formats on a message received from a sending site that is one of the plurality of local sites or one of the plurality of external sites, said conversion being performed in response to a field that is contained in the message and which serves as a trigger for a specific one of the plurality of message formats, and to check sentence construction of the message prior to performing said translation of the message; a message broker operable to transmit a request to and to receive an answer from an application or database that is needed to carry out data exchange processing between the sending site and at least one destination site; a message router operable to add a destination address to the message according to an associated piece of identification information contained in the message, to combine the message with another message having the destination address when the another message exists, the another message being received from another one of the plurality of local sites or from another one of the plurality of external sites, and to decompose the message into a plurality of messages corresponding to a plurality of a destination addresses when the piece of identification information is associated with the plurality of a destination addresses; said B2B connector being operable to process the addressed message or the plurality of addressed messages for transmission to one or more of the plurality of external sites when the message was received from the one of the plurality of local sites; and said gateway being operable to process the addressed message or the plurality of addressed messages for transmission to one or more of the plurality of local sites when the message was received from the one of the plurality of external sites.