Patent ID: 7664916

Claim:
A method comprising: storing, in a computing system, a first freshness indicator associated with item data previously output by a smartcard and the previously output item data as part of an item in a cache maintained by said computing system, the first freshness indicator indicating a time at which a most recent update occurred to the previously output item data or a version attribute of the previously output item data; maintaining a second freshness indicator associated with a current version of the item data, the second freshness indicator and the current version of the item data being stored on the smartcard, the second freshness indicator indicating a time at which a most recent update occurred to the current version of the item data or a version attribute associated with the current version of the item data; and comparing, by the computing system, the first and second freshness indicators to determine whether the previously output item data stored in the cache is the same as the current version of the item data that is stored on the smartcard.