All Inventory servers and inventoried servers have Dictionary Provider and Dictionary Consumer services that are automatically installed during the Server Inventory installation.
When an inventoried server is started, the Dictionary Consumer reads the Dictionary Update policy and contacts the Dictionary Provider (running on the Inventory server) specified in the policy.
Subsequently, the Dictionary Consumer checks for the dictionary updates based on the schedule set in the Dictionary Update policy. It compares the date of the dictionary file on the Dictionary Provider with the file that has been locally stored. If the file on the Dictionary Provider is newer, then the Dictionary Consumer downloads the file from the Dictionary Provider using XML-RPC as per the schedule.