US Patent 7523208 Message filtering

The invention relates to a communications manager, method and computer program for receiving publications and forwarding these on to parties who have subscribed to receive such publications. A subscription request of a first type is received and includes a filter expression having at least one attribute. It is possible to map at least part of such an attribute(s) to a generic format (generic format filter attribute(s)). It is also possible to receive a publication message of a second type and to compare the publication received with the subscription request to determine whether the publication is appropriate for forwarding onto the subscriber originating the request. To enable such a comparison, a generic format filter attribute(s) is identified and is mapped to a format corresponding to the second message type. Once a match is found, the publication can then be transmitted to the originating subscriber.