System and method for sharing information among provider systems
A system is provided wherein information is provided once, and that information is provided to multiple provider systems. Information provided by a user is stored and implemented for each provider as needed. The information is provided by a user to a central server that distributes the information to one or more provider systems. In particular, the information is stored in a database and distributed to the provider system depending on the type of transaction. According to one aspect, the information is stored in an unstructured format in the database. In some embodiments the information contains metatags or indicators that can be parsed by a parser to extract the data content from the desired data fields.
1. A system for sharing customer data with a plurality of service providers, comprising at least one computer processor device configured to implement:
a server process operable to receive a plurality of information items from at least one customer, wherein the plurality of information items are organized into at least two fields of information items;
a database operable to store the information items received from the at least one customer in a plurality of customer data objects, each customer data object including one of the fields of the information and tags indicative of the field, the plurality of customer data objects comprising a first customer data object including a first field of the information and a second customer data object including a second field of the information;
a tag parser that parses the tags to determine the field of the information stored in each of the customer data objects; and
an information manager operable to provide the first customer data object to a first of the plurality of service providers and the second customer data object to a second of the plurality of service providers based upon reference to a table of fields required by at least the first and the second service providers to allow the plurality of service providers to provide services to the at least one customer, wherein the first customer data object is in the table of required fields associated with the first service provider and the second customer data object is in the table of required fields associated with the second service provider.
2. The system of claim 1 , wherein the data parser is an XML parser and the tags are XML tags.
3. The system of claim 1 , wherein the database is a relational database.
4. The system of claim 1 , wherein the data objects are stored in an unstructured format.
5. The system of claim 1 , wherein the information manager is further operable to place the customer data objects into a check-out data construct comprising at least information identifying the customer, information identifying a service provider, customer data corresponding to the data objects and tag information identifying the customer data.
6. The system of claim 1 , wherein the information manager provides data object content to the plurality of service providers by sending the data object content to the plurality of service providers.
7. The system of claim 1 , wherein the server process is further operable to receive a plurality of fields of information from the at least one customer, and wherein the database is further operable to store each field of information in one of the plurality of customer data objects.
8. The system of claim 1 , wherein the server process is further operable to change the format of the first customer data object based upon a format specified by the first of the plurality of service providers and to change the format of the second customer data object based upon a format specified by the second of the plurality of service providers.
9. The system of claim 1 , wherein the server process is further operable to receive a plurality of fields of information from the at least one customer, and wherein the database is further operable to store each field of information in one of the plurality of customer data objects.