Patent ID: 7685265

Claim:
A web-based system for processing notifications, said notifications containing content provided by one or more content providers to subscribed users, said content relating to one or more topics, said system comprising: a computing device to execute a web service on a web server, said web service responsive to notifications requests structured according to an extensible messaging framework, wherein the extensible messaging framework comprises a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), said web service being accessible via a hypertext transport protocol (HTTP), said computing device being coupled to a data communication network and configured to receive notifications requests from a plurality of content providers via the data communication network, said received notifications requests from the plurality of content providers specifying a selected notification management function related to managing subscriptions, said received notifications request being structured according to the extensible messaging framework, wherein the received notifications request comprises a SOAP request, each content provider being associated with a plurality of subscriptions, each subscription being associated with one content provider; a computer-readable storage medium storing computer-executable instructions to be executed on the computing device to extract request information from the plurality of notifications requests, said request information including a content provider identifier, a user identifier to identify the user, and a topic identifier associated with the notifications request, said topic identifier being associated with a corresponding relative uniform resource locator (URL), wherein the relative URL is relative to the web domain of the content provider, such that the web domain of the content provider and the relative URL indicate an absolute URL in the form “//<web domain of content provider><relative URL>”, wherein said corresponding relative URL corresponds to one or more topics, and to perform the selected notification management function based on the extracted request information, wherein the selected notification management function is related to the management of subscriptions associated with the content provider corresponding to the content provider identifier and the topic identifier; and a memory associated with the computing device to store the extracted request information in connection with the selected notification management function.