Abstract: A method and apparatus are provided for use in enabling a user to access online services of a type requiring certain types of personal data to be supplied to respective service providers. An apparatus is provided having a store for storing profile data for use both by users and by service providers to store personal information in respect of those users. The apparatus also has user and service provider interfaces to enable read and write access to the store, identity management means and a profile access controller arranged to implement user-defined access controls in respect of a user's stored profile data. The identity management means are triggerable to allocate or to cease a pseudo-identifier in respect of a user and a selected service provider, the pseudo-identifier being the only identifier by which the service provider may access profile data stored in the store in respect of the user.

Abstract: A channel assignment process for a multi-stage switch arrangement having a plurality of inputs arranged in a plurality of logical associations and a plurality of outputs, wherein time-slotted traffic is received by each logical association of inputs is operated on by one or more switching stages arranged to operate only on traffic provided by the respective logical association of inputs, the channel assignment process comprising: for each logical association, aggregating the time-slots carrying traffic from the inputs forming said logical association to form a channel comprising a plurality of logically associated time-slots; determining a path through a spatial switching stage of the switch arrangement arranged to receive a said channel from each of said logical associations of inputs of the switch arrangement; determining a path for each time-slot within each logical association such that a plurality of end-to-end time-space channels are provided for one or more inputs of the switch arrangement to their req

Abstract: A virtual network has a plurality of nodes, each node with a list for storing up to a predetermined number (L) of addresses representing links to other such nodes.

Abstract: A system (20) and method by virtue of which a preferred data provider is selected from a plurality of data providers (30) by performing the steps of receiving a request for data from a client (10) together with client identification data, identifying a plurality of data providers (30) capable of providing data to the client (10), providing the client identification data to the data providers and instructing the data providers to perform tests in order to establish a measure of the elapsed time for a signal to be sent to and received from the client, and a measure indicative of their remaining capacity for data transfer, and to make these measures available to the system (20). One or more preferred data providers (30) may then be selected on the basis of the elapsed time signals and the remaining capacity signals from said data providers.

Abstract: The method involves transmitting to receivers receiving a multicast a plurality of requests for feedback (3), each request including a probability parameter (P). Each terminal replies to this (or not) with a corresponding probability (4). One then counts the number (r) of replies to each request (5); determines, from the counts and parameters, estimates of the number of receivers (6); and filters the estimates (7). The method further includes repeatedly computing a new probability parameter to be included in a subsequent feedback request, by forecasting, from the counts and parameters, a upper bound for the number of receivers (9, 10, 11) and determining from this the new probability parameter (12) such that the risk that the number of replies exceeds a predefined threshold is kept below a predefined value.

Abstract: An apparatus and method are provided for determining a level of expertise applicable to a particular document and for using this determined level of expertise in an improved information retrieval arrangement. A trainable document classifier is used to identify an applicable level of expertise using a metric indicative of the commonality, as measured with reference to a reference corpus, of terms comprised in a given document, trained using a training set of documents comprising, for each of a plurality of predetermined levels of expertise, a representative sample of documents and their respective metric values. An information retrieval apparatus is arranged to identify documents relevant to a specified category of information and to select from documents so identified those having a level of expertise, determined by the trained document classifier, matching a specified level of expertise for a target user in respect of that category of information.