The e-nvention connecTem application within a e-nvention connecTem system allows to configure and ovserve chains of data processing. However, for successful operation of these data processing chains, the e-nvention connecTem application is not necessary to be running because of the fact that each Service Provider itself locally stores the information needed for successfully completing its task.

Principal architecture	Service Provider	Communication

Each data processing chain gets a name which is unique within the whole e-nvention connecTem system. Furthermore, each data processing chain has got an optional password protecting the chain from any modification by un unauthorised person. e-nvention connecTems allows to create any number of such data processing chains.

A Service Provider is an independent application which is normally not configurated by its own Graphical User Interface but by using the e-nvention connecTem application. Therefore, Service Providers can be running as faceless applications in the background (deamons). A Service Provider provides one or more functions such as text based search/replacement, encoding conversion, image type conversion, access to data base and so on. To use e-nvention connecTem terminology, those functions are called methods. Most of these methods are implemented as plugins. A method itself cannot perform a task, unless it is configurated by the connecTem application in some way. With each method, any number of configurations can be specified, resulting each in a service (e-nvention connecTem terminology). As an example, the method search/replace mentioned above could be configurated by a table specifying to replace 'ize' by 'ise' and 'color' by 'colour'. Another configuration might be the specification of a table which results in the elimination of indentations. For each of these method configurations, a service name has to be assigned. The first example may get the name 'search-replace: American English to British English' and the second one may get the name 'search-replace: remove indentations'. Each of these two configurated methods would then be provided as a service to the overall system. Once created, those services may be part of any data processing chain.

Service Providers communicate with each other using a communication protocol named UniCom. UniCom can make use of HTTP, email (using an SMTP and POP server) and the file system as its data transfer channel. The transmitted data is encoded in XML. Within a connecTem system, all services with the same service name automatically form a service cluster. These service clusters involve redundancy and scalibility to a data processing chain.

The physical extension of the e-nvention connecTem system is given by all the computers on which e-nvention connecTem applications and/or Service Providers are running and which are currently available to the system. Those host computers are defined by a list of single IP addresses and IP address ranges.