US Patent 7272626 E-service management through distributed correlation

The management of end-to-end cooperation among multiple e-service providers is enabled in a distributed correlation manner by locally appending a tag to each outgoing document, with each tag uniquely identifying the transaction to which it is related and identifying management information. The tags are management information structures that are updated at each participating e-service provider. Consequently, in a succession of e-service providers, the parent e-service is furnished with management information for each of the participating e-services and is able to discern the contributions of each such e-service. The different providers maintain separate management information libraries which are used in registration and correlation processes.