Anonymous personal content access with content bridge

摘要

An online content publishing and consumption environment can be modeled such that communities of content consumers (users), such as educational institutes and libraries, are categorized as Content Brokers; content providers, such as book, music, and multimedia publishers, and news sources, are categorized as Content Providers; and a Content Bridge, a standalone component providing the functionalities of the presently claimed invention in the online content publishing and consumption environment. The Content Bridge allows a simpler and loosely-coupled integration with lowered integration cost and effort, as the Content Broker is required to integrate once only with the Content Bridge instead of having to integrate individually with every Content Provider.

主权项

1. A system for accessing online contents, comprising:
a content broker processing server belonging to a content broker for authenticating the one or more users, and maintaining one or more first user identifiers each uniquely associating each user to the content broker, and wherein the content broker processing server comprising:
a content bridge library module for facilitating data exchanges and invocations of computer instruction functions between the content broker processing server and a content bridge processing server; the content bridge processing server for providing one or more user interfaces allowing the one or more users to perform content-related functions including searching, previewing, and purchasing on the online contents; and one or more content provider processing servers for providing the online contents, wherein each of the one or more content provider processing servers comprising the content bridge library module, and wherein each or group of the one or more content provider processing servers belonging to a different content provider in a group of one or more content providers; wherein the online contents comprise one or more different online contents provided by a different content provider in a group of one or more content providers; wherein each content provider in the group of one or more content providers maintains its one or more second user identifiers each uniquely associating each user to the content provider; wherein the content bridge processing server is accessible by the one or more users for requesting access of the online contents; wherein the content bridge processing server is accessible to the content broker processing server for requesting the one or more first user identifiers, and is accessible to the each content provider for requesting the one or more second user identifiers; wherein the content bridge processing server is accessible to the one or more content providers for requesting them to provide the online contents requested by the one or more users; wherein the content bridge processing server maintains a map of the first user identifiers and the second user identifiers; wherein the content bridge processing server performs an ID mapping process mapping the first user identifier of each user to each second user identifier associating the user to each content provider by using the map of the first user identifiers and the second user identifiers; wherein the map of the first user identifiers and the second user identifiers is inaccessible to the content providers such that identities of the users are hidden to the content providers, enabling an asymmetrical authorization and secure content access for the users; and wherein the content bridge processing server is a standalone component integrating with the content broker processing server and each of the one or more content provider servers such that the content broker is required to integrate once only with the content bridge processing server instead of having to integrate individually with every content provider in the group of the one or more content providers.