Patent ID: 7756969

Claim:
A method for providing an identification service in a distributed system, said identification service comprising a plurality of service elements, said method comprising: for at least one of the plurality of service elements, determining whether an application corresponding to the service element is running in the distributed system; dynamically creating an application corresponding to the service element, when said determining step determines that the application is not running, wherein each service element comprises an adapter that receives identification data from a reader, a filter that processes the identification data, and a logger that receives the processed data from the filter and notifies a recipient of the processed data; and monitoring the service elements to determine whether any service element fails, wherein: the dynamically creating further comprises (a) downloading code for the application corresponding to each service element from a code server in the distributed system; and (b) registering the application corresponding to each service element with a registry service in the distributed system; and the identification information further includes at least one of: a location of the item, a time the identification information was read from the item, a date the identification information was read from the item, an identifier of the reader, and a location of the reader.