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Information and Content Exchange, ICE, is a
specification authored by the ICE Authoring Group and hosted by IDEAlliance.
The ICE specification provides businesses with an XML-based common language and
architecture that facilitates automatic management, exchange, update, and
control of assets in a trusted fashion without manual packaging or knowledge of
remote Web site structures. The ICE protocol enables automated syndication of
content on the Web. And in the B2B environment, ICE can be used to automate
the exchange of business information between trading partners.
ICE reduces the cost of doing business
online because it provides standard mechanisms that enable the
controlled exchange and management of electronic assets between networked
partners and affiliates. Applications based on ICE allow companies to easily
construct syndicated publishing networks, Web superstores, and online reseller
channels by establishing Web site-to-Web site information networks.
ICE is based upon the concept of content
exchange between syndicators (providers of information) and subscribers (those
who receive information). ICE is a standardized messaging protocol that
works over a transport layer (like HTTP), to enable automated content
exchange. ICE enables the following capabilities:
Controlled Extensibility.
This is a
defined mechanism to extend ICE
at both the subscription and protocol levels. For example, you can extend ICE to
seamlessly insert encryption at any level in the protocol. ICE automatically
assures that both syndicator and subscriber agree prior to operating
with any new extension. You can also add additional application or
industry specific extensions to support content delivery dialects that make
it easy and efficient to support specific industries.
Generalized Parameter Negotiation.
Both subscriptions and subscriber-syndicator
pairs can negotiate any set of parameters using the newly
updated negotiation mechanism in ICE1.1. This new mechanism is simple
and extremely powerful. A syndicator can construct a catalog of offers
that exclusively reflect capabilities offered by that syndicator. Each offer
can contain not only ICE operational parameters (e.g. delivery times, delivery
frequencies, number of deliveries, etc.) but also any other set of important
parameters available for negotiation (e.g. price, summarization, special
content issues, partial content issues, image resolution, view window size,
type of graphics).
Delivery Policy Controls on Referenced ICE Items.
This allows
a syndicator to explicitly control both the times and the authorization for
a subscriber to access content. It is now possible to tell subscriber that
they have access to streaming content only for a period of five hours on
the day the concert (for example) is performed.
Carefully specified inter-operability semantics.This means that there
are rules to assure that ICE implementations remain able to speak to each other
as the protocol gets upgraded over time.
Today the ICE Authoring Group is starting
work on a new version of the ICE Specification. This Version ICE 2.0, will
have a host of new features to extend ICE functionality and provide messaging
that takes advantage of the latest Web technologies and standards. You can
link to a Preview of ICE 2.0 on
this CD!
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