Patent ID: 8069181

Claim:
A method to integrate services into business processes comprising: providing a user interface for use by a user to create autodiscovery queries, which, when executed on a computer, automatically collect metadata about corresponding electronic services and store query results in a metadata storage, wherein: the metadata storage is accessible by a first server computer and stores files containing metadata about queried electronic services hosted by one or more remote servers including requirements of the electronic services for interoperability with other services; and whereupon execution, each created autodiscovery query implemented within the user interface obtains metadata about a corresponding service by: obtaining a manually entered feed uniform resource locator to a target site associated with the corresponding service; and querying the corresponding service using the obtained feed uniform resource locator to collect digest feed metadata from a digest of the corresponding service, the digest comprising at least one syndication format for content and information required to enable sharing of content among different services or sites; programmably reading a digest feed of the digest using the obtained feed uniform resource locator; automatically obtaining only metadata items that were previously determined to be relevant to enable sharing of content among the different services or sites from the digest; and storing the collected metadata information in the metadata storage.