InterPay: Managing Multiple Payment Mechanisms in Digital Libraries

We propose an architecture called InterPay for managing financial interactions with for-pay digital library services. The approach accommodates multiple payment mechanisms, interaction models, and charging policies. Key components of our model are payment agents and payment capabilities that encapsulate payment policy and the details of payment on behalf of the user. Collection agents and collection capabilities provide similar encapsulation for the service provider. The architecture supports interactions ranging from individual users directly interacting with the service provider to institutional users accessing information brokers via a corporate library. We also describe a prototype system that implements the InterPay architecture, allowing access to real services under varying payment policies. 1 Introduction In an ideal world, access to information and services would be free. However, collecting and providing access to information and services is expensive and these costs must b..

Towards Interoperability in Digital Libraries - Overview and Selected Highlights of the Stanford Digital Library Project

We outline the five main research thrusts of the Stanford Digital Library project, and we describe technical details for two specific efforts that have been realized in prototype implementations. First, we describe how we employ distributed object technology to cope with interoperability among emerging digital library services. In particular, we describe how we use CORBA objects as wrappers to handle differences in service interaction models, and we sketch an information access protocol that takes advantage of distributed object environments. The second effort we cover is InterPay, a framework and protocol for payment among autonomous services. The framework addresses interoperability problems in online payment by cleanly separating information access protocols , payment and charging policies, and the actual mechanics of individual financial transactions