Methods, apparatus, and program products for utilizing contextual property metadata in networked computing environments
AssigneeXerox Corporation
InventorsMark W. Newman, W. Keith Edwards, Jana Z. Sedivy
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Methods, systems, apparatus and program products for accumulating a historical context of interactions between components in an environment where each of the components has a component context that can be revealed. The components include a requester component and a service component. The requester component requests an operation to be performed by the service component. The requester component passes its context to the service component with the operational request. The requester component context is recorded as service component contextual metadata and becomes part of the historical context.
Claims17
A computer controlled method for accumulating a historical context of changes for a device, comprising:
- maintaining on a receiving device a history of contextual changes;
- receiving, by the receiving device, a plurality of requests to perform operations that change a portion of a context associated with the receiving device, wherein each request is transmitted from one of a plurality of requester devices;
- verifying whether each requester device is authorized to perform the requested operation, comprising:
- applying a context access policy to each requester device;
- identifying those requester devices that satisfy the context access policy as authorized requester devices and performing the operation by changing the portion of the receiving device context associated with the request for each of the authorized requester devices;
- and
- identifying those requester devices that fail to satisfy the context access policy as unauthorized devices and denying the requests from the unauthorized requester devices;
- accreting the changed portions of the receiving device context with the history of contextual changes on the receiving device;
- accreting the denied requests of the unauthorized requester devices with the history of contextual changes;
- and
- storing the accreted history of contextual changes.
An apparatus for accumulating a historical context of changes for a device, comprising:
- a history of contextual changes maintained on a receiving device;
- a receiver mechanism of the receiving device to receive a plurality of requests to perform operations that change a portion of a context associated with the receiving device, wherein each request is transmitted from one of a plurality of requester devices;
- a verification mechanism configured to verify whether each requester device is authorized to perform the requested operation, comprising:
- a policy mechanism configured to apply a context access policy to each requester device;
- an identification mechanism configured to identify those requester devices that satisfy the context access policy as authorized requester devices and those requester devices that fail to satisfy the context access policy as unauthorized requester devices;
- a performance mechanism configured to perform the operations by changing the portion of the receiving device context associated with the request for each of the authorized requester devices;
- and
- a decision mechanism configured to deny the requests from the unauthorized requester devices;
- an accretion mechanism configured to accrete the changed portions of the receiving device context and the denied requests for each of the unauthorized requester devices with the history of contextual changes on the receiving device;
- and
- a storage mechanism configured to store the accreted history of contextual changes.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.