Patent ID: 8521614

Claim:
A method for processing feed data from sellers for inclusion of details regarding an item in an item catalog, the method comprising: maintaining in a merchant system feed metadata comprising semantics describing a transformation of seller-facing feed data to customer-facing listings data, wherein the feed metadata comprises at least a first set of semantics describing the transformation of attributes of the item corresponding to a first version of the item catalog and a second set of semantics describing the transformation of the attributes of the item corresponding to a second version of the item catalog; receiving, at one or more computers in the merchant system, a specification of a version of the item catalog and a product category; generating, by the one or more computers, a template for items of the specified product category from the set of semantics in the feed metadata corresponding to the specified version of the item catalog, the template comprising header information indicating the specified version of the item catalog and the specified product category; receiving, at the one or more computers, seller feed data from a seller comprising data describing attributes of the item to be included in the item catalog, wherein the seller feed data is created from the template and wherein the seller feed data comprises the header information indicating the specified version of the item catalog and the specified product category; normalizing, by the one or more computers, the seller feed data based on the set of semantics in the feed metadata corresponding to the specified version of the item catalog and the specified product category; validating, by the one or more computers, the data describing the attributes of the item based on the set of semantics in the feed metadata corresponding to the specified version of the item catalog and the specified product category; and transforming, by the one or more computers, the data describing the attributes of the item in the seller feed data to customer-facing listings data for the item for inclusion in the item catalog based on the set of semantics in the feed metadata corresponding to the specified version of the item catalog and the specified product category.