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Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI, pronounced Yu-diː) is a platform-independent, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based registry for businesses worldwide to list themselves on the Internet and a mechanism to register and locate web service applications. UDDI is an open industry initiative, sponsored by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), enabling businesses to publish service listings and discover each other and define how the services or software applications interact over the Internet.

UDDI was originally proposed as a core Web service standard.^[1] It is designed to be interrogated by SOAP messages and to provide access to Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents describing the protocol bindings and message formats required to interact with the web services listed in its directory.

History

UDDI was written in August 2000, at a time when the authors had a vision of a world in which consumers of Web Services would be linked up with providers through a public or private dynamic brokerage system. In this vision, anyone needing a service such as credit card authentication would go to their service broker and select one supporting the desired SOAP or other service interface and meeting other criteria. In such a world, the publicly operated UDDI node or broker would be critical for everyone. For the consumer, public or open brokers would only return services listed for public discovery by others, while for a service producer, getting a good placement in the brokerage—by relying on metadata of authoritative index categories—would be critical for effective placement.

UDDI was included in the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) standard as a central pillar of web services infrastructure, and the UDDI specifications supported a publicly accessible Universal Business Registry in which a naming system was built around the UDDI-driven service broker.

UDDI has not been widely adopted in the way its designers had hoped.^[2] IBM, Microsoft, and SAP announced they were closing their public UDDI nodes in January 2006.^[3] The group defining UDDI, the OASIS Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Specification Technical Committee voted to complete its work in late 2007 and has been closed.^[4] In September 2010, Microsoft announced they were removing UDDI services from future versions of the Windows Server operating system. Instead, this capability would be moved to Biztalk.^[5]

Some assert^{[citation needed]} that the most common place that a UDDI system can be found is inside a company where it might be used to dynamically bind client systems to implementations. They would say that much of the search metadata permitted in UDDI is not used for this relatively simple role.

Structure

A UDDI business registration consists of three components:

• White Pages — address, contact, and known identifiers;
• Yellow Pages — industrial categorizations based on standard taxonomies;
• Green Pages — technical information about services exposed by the business.

White Pages

White pages give information about the business supplying the service. This includes the name of the business and a description of the business - potentially in multiple languages. Using this information, it is possible to find a service about which some information is already known (for example, locating a service based on the provider's name).^[6]

Contact information for the business is also provided - for example the businesses address and phone number; and other information such as the Dun & Bradstreet Universal Numbering System number.

Yellow Pages

Yellow pages provide a classification of the service or business, based on standard taxonomies. These include the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS),^[7] or the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) .

Because a single business may provide a number of services, there may be several Yellow Pages (each describing a service) associated with one White Page (giving general information about the business).

Green Pages

Green pages are used to describe how to access a Web Service, with information on the service bindings. Some of the information is related to the Web Service - such as the address of the service and the parameters, and references to specifications of interfaces[1]. Other information is not related directly to the Web Service - this includes e-mail, FTP, CORBA and telephone details for the service. Because a Web Service may have multiple bindings (as defined in its WSDL description), a service may have multiple Green Pages, as each binding will need to be accessed differently.

UDDI Nodes & Registry

UDDI nodes are servers which support the UDDI specification and belong to a UDDI registry while UDDI registries are collections of one or more nodes.

SOAP is an XML-based protocol to exchange messages between a requester and a provider of a Web Service. The provider publishes the WSDL to UDDI and the requester can join to it using SOAP.

See also

• XML-RPC
• Java API for XML Registries
• WS-I Basic Profile
• Web Services Discovery
• United Nations Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC)
• ebXML
• S-RAMP

References

External links

• UDDI specifications
• OASIS UDDI Technical Committee
• UDDI XML.org community site
• UDDI Browser
• C++ Data Binding for UDDI
• Introduction to UDDI: Important Features and Concepts
• Web Service Deployment
• jUDDI (pronounced "Judy") is an open source Java implementation of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI v3) specification for Web Services.