UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration)
At its foundation, UDDI is a group of specifications that lets Web service providers publish information about their Web services and lets Web service requesters search that information to find a Web service and run it.
Under the covers, UDDI consists of an XML schema that defines UDDI's four core data structures - business, service, binding and programmatic interface - and a set of APIs that operate on those structures. UDDI was developed by IBM, Microsoft and Ariba, and is now under the stewardship of the UDDI Community, which has more than 200 member companies.
The architecture of UDDI allows for public and private registries, with private registries accessible by business partners across an extranet and within an organization over an intranet. Private registries are expected to achieve earlier adoption than public registries, because Web services are first being deployed by corporations inside the firewall. For corporations, UDDI registries provide a key advantage over standard software release management practices. As new or updated versions of a Web service are released, a UDDI registry lets the service be put to use immediately by the requesting application without any recoding or reintegration work.
From UDDI is Yellow Pages of Web services, Network World, 05/27/02.
Additional resources
What is UDDI?
Network World Tech Exec Newsletter, 08/06/01.
uddi.org
Has detailed specifications and API info.
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