Infrastructure for an open digital services marketplace

An software infrastructure for an open digital services marketplace, comprising:

• naming manager that enables a requesting task to refer to a desired resource using a name which is local to the requesting task by translating the name to a reference to the desired resource in response to a request from the requesting task that specifies the name;
• router that forwards the request to an appropriate handler for the desired resource and that enables at least one additional task to be invoked in response to the request;
• permission manager that compares a set of access rights of the requesting task to the desired resource to a set of permissions associated with the desired resource such that the access rights are kept separately from the reference to the desired resource;
• wherein the desired resource, the requesting task, the additional task, and a set of additional components used to handle the request are each modeled as a resource defined by a corresponding set of meta-data, each set of meta-data having a set of attributes and a reference to a grammar for interpreting the attributes.