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Last modified: March 13, 2008
Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)

Contents

"The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specifications define a registry service for Web services and for other electronic and non-electronic services. A UDDI registry service is a Web service that manages information about service providers, service implementations, and service metadata. Service providers can use UDDI to advertise the services they offer. Service consumers can use UDDI to discover services that suit their requirements and to obtain the service metadata needed to consume those services. The UDDI V2.0 and 3.0 specifications have been approved as OASIS Standards and are maintained by the OASIS UDDI Specification technical committee. Numerous vendors and open source communities supply products that implement the UDDI standards..." [from the FAQ document]

Update 2005-02-02: Version 3 of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification, in development since mid-2002, has been ratified as an OASIS Standard. UDDI provides an interoperable, foundational infrastructure for a Web services-based software environment for publicly available services and services only exposed internally within an organization. A key objective in UDDI v3.0.2 is to support secure interaction of private and public UDDI implementations. See the news story "OASIS Consortium Members Approve UDDI Version 3 as an OASIS Standard."

The UDDI project takes advantage of WorldWide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), and HTTP and Domain Name System (DNS) protocols. Additionally, cross platform programming features are addressed by adopting early versions of the proposed Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) known as XML Protocol messaging specifications found at the W3C Web site. The UDDI protocol is the building block that will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact with one another using their preferred applications..." [UDDI Member Section, 'About']

UDDI4J is "a Java class library that provides an API to interact with a UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) registry. The UDDI Project is a comprehensive, open industry initiative enabling businesses to (I) discover each other, and (II) define how they interact over the internet and share information in a global registry architecture. UDDI is the building block which will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact with one another via their preferred applications..." See the UDDI4J Project description and the development web site.

In January 2005, the approved Committee Specification for UDDI version 3.0.2 was balloted for ratification as an OASIS Standard. The key objective in UDDI Version 3.0 is to support secure interaction of private and public implementations as major element of service-oriented infrastructure. "The UDDI Version 3.0.2 Specification describes the Web services, data structures and behaviors of all instances of a UDDI registry. The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) protocol is a key member of the group of interrelated standards that comprise the Web services stack. It defines a standard method for publishing and discovering the network-based software components of a service-oriented architecture. The UDDI v3 specification builds on top of the OASIS UDDI v2 Standard. This version of the specification has been designed to be used in combination with other complementary Web services specifications. UDDI Version 3.0 builds on the vision of UDDI: a 'meta service' for locating web services by enabling robust queries against rich metadata. Expanding on the foundation of the OASIS UDDI v2 Standard, UDDI v3 offers the industry a specification for building flexible, interoperable XML Web services registries useful in private as well as public deployments..." [ballot text]

Principal References

Public UDDI websites and registries

UDDI Business Registry Shutdown. UDDI Business Registry Update 2005-12: "With the approval of UDDI v3.02 as an OASIS Standard in 2005, and the momentum UDDI has achieved in market adoption, IBM, Microsoft and SAP have evaluated the status of the UDDI Business Registry and determined that the goals for the project have been achieved. Given this, the UDDI Business Registry will be discontinued as of 12 January 2006." [from 'Registering for UDDI' 2005-12-17]

UBR Shutdown References:

UDDI Specifications

General: News, Articles, Reports, Papers, Press Releases

  • [March 13, 2008] "Crawling Multiple UDDI Business Registries." By Eyhab Al-Masri and Qusay H. Mahmoud (Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada N1G 2W1). Poster Paper presented at the Sixteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007) [May 8-12, 2007, Banff, Canada]. Topic: Services. From the Abstract: "As Web services proliferate, size and magnitude of UDDI Business Registries (UBRs) are likely to increase. The ability to discover Web services of interest then across multiple UBRs becomes a major challenge specially when using primitive search methods provided by existing UDDI APIs. Clients do not have the time to endlessly search accessible UBRs for finding appropriate services particularly when operating via mobile devices. Finding services of interest should be time effective and highly productive. This paper addresses issues relating to the efficient access and discovery of Web services across multiple UBRs and introduces a novel exploration engine, the Web Service Crawler Engine (WSCE). WSCE is capable of crawling multiple UBRs, and enables for the establishment of a centralized Web services repository that can be used for discovering Web services much more efficiently. The paper presents experimental validation, results, and analysis of the proposed ideas...

    WSCE is part of the Web Service Repository Builder (WSRB) in which it actively crawls accessible UBRs, and collects information in a centralized repository called the Web Service Storage (WSS). A Query Engine (QE) within WSRB provides clients with an interface to perform advanced search and discovery operations. Our approach in implementing the conceptual discovery model is a process-per-service design in which WSRB runs each Web service crawl as a process that is managed and handled by the WSCE's Event and Load Manager (ELM). The crawling process starts with dispensing Web services into the WsToCrawl queue. The WSCE Ws Seed List contains hundreds or thousands of business keys, service keys, and corresponding UBR inquiry locations. WSCE begins with a collection of Web services and loops through taking a Web service from WsToCrawl queue. WSCE then starts analyzing Web service information located within the registry, tModels, and any associated WSDL information through the Analysis Module. WSCE stores this information in the Web Service Storage (WSS) after processing it through the Indexing Module. After completion, WSCE adds an entry of the Web service (using serviceKey) into VisitedWs queue. Conceptually, WSCE examines all Web services from accessible UBRs through businessKeys and serviceKeys and checks whether any new businessKeys or serviceKeys are extracted. If the businessKey or serviceKey has already been fetched, it is discarded; otherwise, it is added to the WsToCrawl queue. WSCE contains a queue of VisitedWS which includes a list of crawled Web services. In cases the crawler process fails or crashes, information is lost, and therefore, ELM handles such scenarios and updates the WsToCrawl through the Extract Ws component...

    Data used in this work are based on actual implementations of existing UBRs including: Microsoft, Microsoft Test, XMethods.net, and SAP... Our experiments demonstrate that building a crawler and a centralized repository for Web services is inevitable. For future work, we plan to extend our current framework to include a ranking mechanism that outputs desired services of interest within top results and therefore, rendering the discovery process to become more efficient."

  • [September 30, 2005] "Oracle-Systinet Deal a Win-Win." By Colleen Frye. From SearchWebServices.com (September 30, 2005). "Oracle Corp. and Systinet Corp. have entered into a strategic three-year agreement in which Oracle will embed Systinet's registry with the recently unveiled Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Also under the terms of the contract, Oracle will have the ability to prepopulate the registry with business services based on Oracle's family of application software. For Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle, the deal will not only provide a UDDI v3 registry, it will also provide lifecycle management capabilities, which will become more important as organizations reach a critical mass with Web services and service-oriented architecture. 'One of the main reasons Oracle was interested in working with Systinet was [its] support for the UDDI v3 standard, ratified at the beginning of this year,' said Ian Bruce, director of marketing for Systinet, Burlington, Mass. 'But the standard is simply a protocol; we've added a lot of functionality that is very attractive to BEA Systems Inc. and Oracle, like lifecycle management.' According to Mike Lehmann, director of product management for Oracle Application Server, early adopters of Web services who are increasing their portfolio of services are beginning to be concerned about having a system of record and a taxonomy. 'Customers wanted more than just the basic vanilla UDDI v2 registry we provided; they obviously wanted UDDI v3, and Systinet has built a pretty rich functional interface on top of the UDDI v3 spec'..."

  • [September 22, 2005] "UDDI Registry Helps NASA Create an Earth Science 'Marketplace'." By Colleen Frye. From SearchWebServices.com (September 22, 2005). "Businesses looking to build more agile architectures that enable them to discover and reuse their IT assets in new ways can take a page from NASA's playbook. Long before acronyms like SOA, SOAP and UDDI were part of the vernacular, the earth science community, under the auspices of the NASA, began building an SOA for the Earth Observing System Clearinghouse (ECHO), which allows scientists to access, search and share earth science meta data. Now NASA has rolled out an extended services registry for ECHO, based on a UDDI registry from Systinet Corp., Burlington, Mass., which allows third parties to publish and access data. ECHO, initiated in 1998, was built from the get-go, utilizing XML and Web service technologies. The ECHO system acts as middleware between data partners and client partners; client partners develop software to access the information... The ECHO environment comprises an Oracle 9i back-end database from Oracle Corp., and the plan is to move to Oracle 10g. The WebLogic application server from BEA Systems Inc. hosts most of the core business logic. Apache Axis and Tomcat are also utilized. The Systinet UDDI server is used to expose the service registry through the industry standard UDDI protocol. And developers use Eclipse and a variety of other tools... Wichmann said the team is in the process of upgrading ECHO to be compliant with the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Basic Profile. In version 8 of the system (the current version is 6), he said, 'ECHO itself will be available as a Web service'..."

  • [February 22, 2005] "UDDI v3: The Registry Standard for SOA." A Webinar hosted by OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee. February 22, 2005. "UDDI v3.0.2 OASIS Standard: was approved by OASIS membership at-large in February 2005. Widely regarded as a cornerstone of Web services; it defines a standard method for publishing and discovering network-based software components in an SOA; the spec was developed within an open process... Ongoing work of the OASIS UDDI TC: [1] Technical Notes (TN) published to date: Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry; Using BPEL4WS in a UDDI Registry; Generating a JAX-RPC Client for UDDI 3.0.2; UDDI as the registry for ebXML Components; Providing a Value Set For Use in UDDI; Versioning Value Sets in a UDDI Registry; Value Set Overview Documents; Handling of anyURI datatypes [2] TNs in progress and under consideration in 2005 'WSRP - UDDI' Technical Note: publication and discovery of WSRP Producer and Portlet services Using WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment with UDDI 'WSDM - UDDI' TN: mapping of WSDM metrics and management endpoints to UDDI WS-Security Related work ('HTTP Basic and Digest Authentication' TN, 'WS-Security TN for Modeling WS-Security in UDDI' TN).." [source]

  • [February 08, 2005] "Core Web Service Standard UDDI Evolves With Version 3.0.2." By Charles Abrams, Ray Valdes, and David Mitchell Smith. A Gartner Research Note, ID Number: G00126170. (February 08, 2005). ['The new version of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard, used for building registries of service-oriented business applications (SOBAs), shows progress but still faces adoption challenges.'] "New features in UDDI v. 3.0.2 include: (1) Support for digital signatures, which will allow UDDI to deliver a higher degree of data integrity and authenticity; (2) Extended discovery features, which combine multistep queries used in prior versions into a single-step complex query. Subqueries can also be nested within a single query, allowing client machines to narrow their searches more efficiently; (3) A change in the underlying mechanism for pointers to actual services, from Globally Unique Identifiers to the more Web-centric Universal Resource Identifier... UDDI offers a standardized mechanism for discovering Web services, and is supported by major Web services platform vendors. Although UDDI is foundational, its adoption by enterprises has lagged behind that of the other cornerstones of Web services — SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language). Gartner surveys show that fewer than 10 percent of businesses use UDDI for their service-oriented architecture (SOA) registries. UDDI v. 3.0.2 serves enterprise needs better than prior implementations, through increased trust mechanisms and more robust categorization and security capabilities. Gartner clients have not stated that a lack of the features now provided by v. 3.0.2 has stopped them from adopting UDDI. Nonetheless, we believe that the use of UDDI will grow as businesses recognize that it provides benefits for internal uses and can be used as the basis for a development-time repository. We also believe that UDDI may eventually merge with alternative technologies, such as XMethods and ebXML Registry, which are used as much as UDDI..." [source PDF, cache]

  • [February 03, 2005] "OASIS Approves UDDI Upgrade. Web Services Directory Spec Gains SOA, Digital Signature Boosts." By Paul Krill. From InfoWorld (February 03, 2005). "OASIS on Thursday announced that the organization has approved Version 3.0.2 of the UDDI Web services directory specification as an OASIS standard, the highest level of ratification. Featured in Version 3.0.2 is the ability to affiliate registries. This is in keeping with the emphasis of SOAs (service-oriented architectures) on supporting a variety of infrastructural variations and providing a means to define relationships among UDDI registries, according to OASIS. The new version offers a standardized approach to ensure interoperable communication between server peers. To make it easier for developers and architects to communicate, Version 3.0.2 allows for well-known identifiers for service descriptions to facilitate reuse of service descriptions among registries. Other features supported include digital signatures and extended discovery to combine multi-step queries into a single query. Also highlighted is the ability to nest sub-queries within a single query, for narrowing of searches. Companies such as IBM, SAP, and Computer Associates are expressing support for the new specification..." See the news story "OASIS Consortium Members Approve UDDI Version 3 as an OASIS Standard."

  • [February 03, 2005] "More Open UDDI Web Services Directory Standard Ratified by OASIS." By ADT Staff. In Application Development Trends (February 03, 2005). "A new version of Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), the often forgotten XML-based standard for Web services, won approval from OASIS. IBM announced it will support the new version in its J2EE WebSphere Application Server. Big Blue continues to believe the directory services provided by UDDI will be helpful in the discovery of Web services within an IT infrastructure, according to Karla Norsworthy, vice president of software standards for IBM. The next version of SAP NetWeaver, the open integration and application platform for mySAP Business Suite and SAP xApp composite applications, will support UDDI V3, according to a spokesperson for the German software vendor..."

  • [January 27, 2005] "W3C, OASIS Recommend New Web Services Standards." By Darryl Taft. In eWEEK (January 27, 2005). "OASIS initiated final voting this month on the latest version of the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) specification, version 3.0. The actual version sent out to vote on is version 3.0.2, said Luc Clément, senior program manager at Systinet Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., and co-chair of the OASIS UDDI technical committee. UDDI is a Web-based distributed directory that enables businesses to list themselves on the Internet and discover each other, similar to a traditional phone book's yellow and white pages. The UDDI registry is both a white pages business directory and a technical specifications library. Version 3 of the specification was initially released in July 2002, Clément said, 'with the guiding principal of making the spec enterprise ready. Now it's been two years and we have gone through two sets of errata and we can see that our assumptions were right on.' Clément, who said he has been involved with UDDI since 2001, said UDDI 3.0 went out for final vote on Jan. 15 and he expects to see the specification completed by Jan. 31, 2005... One of the features in UDDI 3.0 that help make the specification enterprise ready is the 'ability to define your own keys. You need to have well-known interfaces and identities, and version 3 allows you generate your own keys,' Clément said. Version 3.0 also includes the ability to support change management, and also includes the ability to support data integrity and nonrepudiation of data. 'We provided the ability to support digital signatures to ensure the integrity of the data,' Clément said. Meanwhile, Tony Rogers, a senior architect at Computer Associates International Inc. of Islandia, N.Y., and cochair of the OASIS UDDI technical committee, said he finds it noteworthy that other standards groups have adopted the UDDI specification in their work, such as the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization), which maps policy to the UDDI registry. 'Version 3 has been out in the real world for a long time,' Rogers said. 'It's out there and being beaten on in real life.' Clément said Systinet has been among the first to implement UDDI 3.0 and to put a product on the market. Clément said, 'We've had support for version 3 for about eight months.' And this month the company began shipping the latest release of its Web services infrastructure platform, which adds a business services registry on top of UDDI, he said..."

  • [January 26, 2005] Generating a JAX-RPC Client for UDDI 3.0.2. UDDU Spec TC Technical Note. Author: John Colgrave (IBM). Edited by Matthew Dovey (Oxford) and Mirek Novotny (Systinet). Revision 0.3. Document identifier: 'uddi-spec-tc-tn-jax-rpc'. URLs: this version (HTML) and latest version. "There are several incompatible Java clients for UDDI V2 which prevents portability of UDDI applications and tools written in Java. This Technical Note aims to avoid a repetition of this for UDDI V3 by encouraging the use of a single JAX-RPC programming model for UDDI V3. This document describes the additions and changes to the UDDI 3.0.2 WSDL and schemas to enable a Java client to be generated according to the requirements of the JAX-RPC 1.1 Specification... This Technical Note is intended for anyone who intends to produce a Java client for UDDI 3.0.2." [source .DOC, cache]

  • [January 20, 2005] "DISA Cancels RFP for Enterprise Services Project." By Dawn S. Onley. In Government Computer News (January 20, 2005) "The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) this week abruptly cancelled a request for proposals on a universal discovery tool for its Net-Centric Enterprise Services initiative. The cancellation of the RFP has some pondering the future of the NCES program. 'I think they're moving it along at the Office of the Secretary of Defense level as a concept, but they wanted to move it from an idea to something that was buildable,' an industry source said. Late last month, DISA posted a notice seeking to procure a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration Registry commercial product with unlimited licenses for NCES usage. The purchase would have supported the establishment of a UDDI registry for use within NCES — a key move to bring the NCES concept over to Web services. The agency cancelled that notice on January 18, 2005. NCES is considered one of the major components of the Global Information Grid, the Defense Department's global network for classified and nonclassified data. NCES is comprised of nine core services: applications, collaboration, discovery, enterprise service management, mediation, messaging, security, storage and user assistance..." Note: The Request for Proposal (RFP) HC1047-05-R-4011 requested a price for (e.g.,) "Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Registry COTS Product with Unlimited Licenses for NCES Usage... The registry must be based upon the UDDI standard to support the Discovery of services on an enterprise scale in order to comply with the OSD Net-Centric checklist and to integrate with the NCES Core Discovery service. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) protocol is an industry standard governed by the OASIS consortium. UDDI specifies a standard interoperable protocol that enables Web Service consumers to discover and use Web Services, providing the key publication and discovery capabilities of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). UDDI is a cross industry effort driven by major platform and software providers. This purchase will support the establishment of a UDDI registry for use within the NCES..."

  • [December 02, 2004] "Was the Universal Service Registry a Dream? Features in UDDI and RDF May Just Make the Dream Come True." By Fred Hartman and Harris Reynolds. From Web Services Journal (December 02, 2004). "For all the limitations of UDDI, there is currently no alternative registry standard that can match its maturity or features. RDF has much interesting potential, but is still far from being a viable ISR. A combination RDF and UDDI implementation needs mature implementations of a number of components and interfaces that are currently in their infancy. UDDI implementations are solving real-world business problems today and UDDI is not standing still. There are proposals to add RDF features to UDDI. Some UDDI vendors have extended their implementations with more granular security controls, merged service namespace across multiple registries, and identification of equivalent services to allow on-the-fly service failover without requiring hardware clustering. There are solutions for the limitations of UDDI, but it remains to be seen if these and future proposals will be accepted, and if the timeline toward workable implementations will stay ahead of the progress in the RDF world..."

  • [December 01, 2004] "Insurance That SOA Works." By Michael S. Mimoso. From SearchWebServices.com (December 01, 2004). "Insurance and security may be what The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. offers its customers worldwide. But it's also what the investment and insurance provider's application delivery group was looking for when it created an SOA-based reference architecture using a UDDI registry so that the company's four lines of business could leverage the same applications. "We wanted to move away from siloed applications to an enterprise approach," said Ben Moreland, director of the property and casualty division's application delivery group. In 2003, Moreland's group tackled scalability issues with its single-entry multiple-carrier interface (SEMCI) application that exchanges documents in Accord XML. Accord XML is an insurance industry standard the enables agents to obtain client information and broadcast it to other carriers and receive quotes in return. The introduction of a UDDI registry enabled the application to do dynamic binding checks with the registry as the application evolves, Moreland said. UDDI is a Web services protocol that discovers and stores services. Used in conjunction with Accord XML version 2.0, The Hartford created new services, published them to the UDDI registry without any changes to the orchestration..."

  • [November 17, 2004] "Users and Vendors Demonstrate Support for UDDI OASIS Standard at Gartner Web Services Summit. Charles Schwab and The Hartford Present UDDI Implementations IBM, Oracle, SAP, Systinet, and Prove UDDI Interoperability." - "Implementations and interoperability of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) OASIS Standard were featured at today's Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit. Representatives from The Hartford and Charles Schwab each presented details on their company's implementation of UDDI registries as core foundation components of their Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Then, members of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee staged a live demo incorporating UDDI product offerings from IBM, Oracle, SAP, Systinet, and others in a business scenario. 'Enterprise business analysts, architects, and developers fully understand that a business services registry is the foundation of the SOA infrastructure,' noted Tony Rogers of Computer Associates, co-chair of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee. 'The UDDI OASIS Standard has established itself as an important enabler of visibility, manageability, adaptability, and reusability of the service-oriented enterprise.' The OASIS UDDI InterOp at Gartner featured an inventory management scenario for a chain of book stores. Varying in size from mall kiosks to large retail outlets, each store maintained its own inventory management processes, which were not centrally controlled. By using UDDI to integrate suppliers and inventory management systems, corporate purchasers were able to monitor inventory levels, replenish stock, respond quickly to demand fluctuations, streamline procurement, and deliver useful information on product demand to publishers. 'Today we provided concrete, real-world examples of UDDI registries as the foundation of SOA,' said Luc Clément of Systinet, co-chair of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee. 'We demonstrated how enterprises can exploit a UDDI registry to deploy adaptive business services dealing with the realities of change within the enterprise by showing the benefits of location-independence. In the process, we showed how you can add new services without the need to do any configuration other than the act of publishing the new service. And finally, we demonstrated how UDDI brings an increase in visibility and reuse that dramatically reduces the cost of an SOA integration.' Participation in the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee remains open to all organizations and individuals. End-users and system integrators are invited to join OASIS to advance the adoption of this international standardization effort. OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment and the uddi-dev mailing list for exchanging information on implementing the standard..."

  • [November 15, 2004] "Data Management, Tools Wrap: Systinet Hails UDDI." By Paul Krill. From InfoWorld (November 15, 2004). "Systinet is releasing an upgrade of its UDDI-based business services registry that adds a configurable services console, advanced classification management, and publishing wizards for mapping and publishing of service data. Version 5.5 of Systinet Business Services Registry is intended to provide for SOA 'governance' and application life cycle management, serving as a hub. With the business services console, users gain an easy way to navigate and search for services based on specific categorizations, such as business processes like order entry or credit authorization. An advanced classification management function enables users to set up the business service model and change relationships of services. Typically, services are customer- defined into classifications such as service views or security policy compliance. Previously, classifications in the product were based on standard UDDI taxonomies. SOA information publishing wizards in Version 5.5 allow for automatic mapping and publishing of business service data while providing standard SOA information, including XML Schema, WSDL, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), and versioning, according to Systinet. Specific XML documents can be related to a Web service. A policy document, for example, could be based on a Web services policy and describe a rule such as a security rule..."

  • [November 15, 2004] "Systinet Unveils First Business Services Registry for SOA Latest Version of Proven Systinet Registry Provides the Standards-Based Foundation for SOA Governance and Lifecycle Management." - "Systinet, the provider of the leading foundation for SOA governance and lifecycle management, today announced the release of Systinet Registry 5.5, the industry's most complete and proven Business Services Registry. The Business Services Registry is the centerpiece of Systinet's foundation for governance and lifecycle management within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Business Services Registry provides Systinet's customers a simpler, faster, and easier way to establish control of an SOA. This is especially crucial during the transition from point-to-point Web services to re-usable business services. Systinet Registry creates the system of record for all information about business services in the SOA; provides lifecycle functions to enable, publish, discover, and manage business services; allows for on-demand re-use of business services; and acts as the guide in mapping business processes to SOA. 'There's tremendous power for SOA governance if you store process, policy, SLAs, and related information about services in a registry,' said Frank Kenney, research analyst at Gartner. 'Gartner believes that registries will be essential to minimally discover and document services and preferably to enable the governance function.' Systinet Registry 5.5 extends beyond full v3 UDDI compliance to include federation, security, data validation and lifecycle services for change management and notification and quality of service management. It supports any Web services enablement or management platform and works with traditional message oriented middleware (MOM), enterprise application integration (EAI) or enterprise service bus (ESB). With Systinet Registry, businesses are able to manage complete SOA business service lifecycles across disparate, heterogeneous environments. The new Business Service Registry builds on the company's already proven versions currently in use at Motorola, Level 3, and the U.S. Department of Defense..."

  • [November 02, 2004] "A New Approach to UDDI and WSDL, Part 5: Query from a Java Application Using the New OASIS UDDI WSDL Technical Note." By John Colgrave. From IBM developerWorks (November 02, 2004). "This article is the fifth in a series outlining a new approach to using WSDL and UDDI as described in the Technical Note. It shows how to implement the approach to query from a Java application as defined in the Technical Note using UDDI4J. Earlier installments in the serialized article (1) explain the new approach to constructing a UDDI model of a WSDL description; (2) describe the types of UDDI query this new approach enables, with examples of several queries given in the form of UDDI V2 API requests; (3) present a more complex example than the one in the Technical Note, including screen shots showing you how to publish the UDDI entities and how to construct the types of query described in the Technical Note and in Part 2; (4) present some example Java code showing you how to publish WSDL descriptions to UDDI programatically. See also the references for Parts 1-4 of this serial article.

  • [September 30, 2004] "WSRP-UDDI Technical Note." Edited by Richard Jacob (IBM) and Andre Kramer (Citrix Systems Inc). Version: draft-10. September 30, 2004. Produced by members of the OASIS WSRP TC, Publish Find Bind SC. Document Identifier: 'wsrp-pfb-uddi-tn-1.0-draft-10.doc'. The goals for this technical note are to: (1) enable the automatic publishing of WSRP Producers and Portlets to UDDI registries using tooling support and (2) enable manual publishing of WSRP Producers and optionally Portlets to UDDI registries. The WSRP Publish Find Bind Abstract Model provides guidelines for publishing WSRP Producers and Portlets as services in registries. This technical note adheres to the guidelines and maps the abstract model to UDDI specific schemes and data structures. Compared to many Web Services scenarios, WSRP services prove more complex. Firstly, the WSRP Producer can be considered as a Web Service on its own, exposing multiple Bindings and PortTypes. One can view the WSRP Producer as the actual Web Service described through the WSRP WSDLs. Secondly, Portlets can also be understood to be services. In contrast to Producers, Portlets are not full services in a Web Service sense. In addition to the WSDL interface specification, WSRP services carry metadata which describes both the Producer and its Portlets. Prior to using a Producer or its Portlets this metadata has to be obtained..." See also WSRP references. [source PDF]

  • [August 23, 2004] "UDDI URI Scheme Registration with IANA." By Andrew Hately (IBM Software Group, Emerging Technologies). For the OASIS UDDI Specification TC. IETF Internet Draft, 'draft-hately-uddi-uri-scheme-00.txt'. July 2004, expires January 2005. "This IETF document reproduces the UDDI keying scheme definition found in the OASIS UDDI Version 3 Specification and is published as an RFC for ease of access and IANA registration. Change control is retained within OASIS..." See the announcement. From IETF: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hately-uddi-uri-scheme-00.txt.

  • [July 29, 2004] "Auto Industry Seeks to Improve Web Services." By Laurie Sullivan. From InformationWeek (July 29, 2004). "A project being undertaken by leading members of the auto industry next month could facilitate the convergence of much-needed capabilities found in the ebXML transaction standard into the three most widely accepted Web-services specifications. As part of the Automotive Industry Action Group's project to improve visibility within the supply chain, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., and most recently DaimlerChrysler have agreed to work to bring ebXML's encryption, reliability, and security capabilities to the UDDI registry of available services, the Web Services Description Language, XML-based code that carries out Web services requests, and the Simple Object Access Protocol used to transfer the data. EbXML is more advanced than these Web-services protocols, according to research firm Gartner, providing for reliable business collaboration and interenterprise process automation. 'The automotive industry is trying to bring authentication and nonrepudiation to messaging of Web services based on ebXML,' says Gartner Research analyst Frank Kenney. The auto industry's Inventory Visibility and Interoperability project is based on ebXML standards, but the car makers say suppliers already supporting UDDI, WSDL, and Soap would rather see ebXML's benefits brought to those platforms than have to support another standard..."

  • [July 25, 2004] Using BPEL4WS in a UDDI Registry. By Claus von Riegen (SAP) and Ivana Trickovic (SAP). Edited by Luc Clément (Systinet) and Andrew Hately (IBM). July 19, 2004. 23 pages. "BPEL4WS abstract processes describe the observable behavior of Web services. They complement abstract WSDL interfaces (port types and operations) and the UDDI model by defining dependencies between service operations in the context of a message exchange. This technical note describes the relationships between the three models and suggests how BPEL4WS abstract processes can be used in a UDDI Registry." [source PDF]

  • [July 01, 2004] "WebMethods, for One, Believes in UDDI. New Platform Built to Publish Services to a Directory." By Edward J. Correia. From Software Development Times (July 01, 2004). "In the future, all Web services will be published through UDDI. That perhaps unlikely scenario is the outlook for customers of WebMethods Inc., which in June released Enterprise Services Platform, a combination of the company's Fabric, Glue and Integration Platform that it says not only turns any application, service or legacy system into a Web service, but automatically publishes them to a UDDI directory for easier inclusion in future apps. Graham Glass, WebMethods' chief technology officer, said that for developers looking for cohesion as they piece together applications, UDDI is the only game in town. "Web services is the only standard that everybody is supporting. Now, if third-party software comes along and does a UDDI lookup, it will be able to automatically find other services exposed through the platform." Though Fabric has supported the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration spec since version 1.0, Glass said all of Enterprise Services Platform (ESP) is now integrated with the specification..."

  • [June 21, 2004] "Creating Your Own Private UDDI Registry." By Jeff Hanson. From DevX.com (June 21, 2004). "Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification and protocol work together to form define messages, application programming interfaces (APIs), and data structures for building distributed registries of Web services and storing the business and technical information associated with these services. UDDI is an OASIS standard. There are fundamentally two types of UDDI registries: public registries and private registries. This article shows you how to implement a private registry. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification and protocol work together to form one of the primary components of a complete Web services infrastructure. jUDDI is an open source Java implementation of the UDDI specification for Web services. By following the steps shown in this article, you can use jUDDI to create a private UDDI registry that handles publication, authentication, and inquiry requests... You can use the information provided in a UDDI registry to perform three types of searches: (1) A white pages search returns basic information such as address, contact, and identifiers about a company and its services; (2) A yellow pages topical search retrieves information according to industrial categorizations and taxonomies, such as the NAICS, ISO3166, and UNSPSC classification systems; (3) A green pages service search retrieves technical information about Web services, as well as information describing how to execute these services..."

  • [June 04, 2004] "UDDI as an Extended Web Services Registry. Versioning, Quality of Service, and More." By Adam Blum. From Web Services Journal (June 04, 2004). "This article discusses how UDDI can be used as this more robust registry of extensive information on each Web service. It describes UDDI tModels for categorization and shows how they are used in the 'Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry, Version 2.0' Technical Note to represent all of the information present in WSDL in UDDI. It then describes how the techniques used by the WSDL mapping technical note can be used to represent new classes and attributes of information generally. As enterprises build a critical mass of Web services, they need some way of keeping track of those services. UDDI is an ideal store for such information. Using UDDI's built-in abstractions of business services, binding templates, and tModels referring to interface specifications, UDDI can be used to manage all of the addresses and protocols and formats of those services. Incremental standards in the form of UDDI Technical Notes are emerging for these attributes of Web services and others to allow tracking of this information..."

  • [May 11, 2004] "Infravio Spiffs Up Web Services Registry Idea." By Martin LaMonica. ZDNet News (May 11, 2004). "Start-up Infravio is reviving the notion of a Web services application marketplace to set itself apart in the market for Web services management tools. With its X-registry, Infravio is trying to cash into a long-held idea that never fully got off the ground. Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) — one of the first XML-related protocols called Web services — was first developed as a sort of yellow pages to locate available services. The idea was to provide a large repository of available services on the Internet to which anyone could connect. That vision never really took hold, in part because of business reasons. Integrating complex systems between companies proved to be very challenging technically, and corporations tend to work within a network of known partners rather than rent software from a little-known intermediary. Infravio executives said that its X-Registry improves on UDDI to achieve a similar vision of a Web services marketplace. Calling it an 'Amazon.com for Web services,' Infravio president and CEO Jeff Tonkel said X-Registry will give companies a central point for viewing available services and a structured process for keeping track of Web services in use..."

  • [April 21, 2004] "WASP UDDI 5.0 Beta: Support for OASIS UDDI V3 Specification." - "Systinet has announced the Beta availability of WASP UDDI, 5.0, with full support for the OASIS UDDI V3 Specification. Systinet WASP UDDI is the first and only commercial registry to fully support the latest V3 specification, which provides new functionality specifically for private, enterprise deployments. A major advancement in the Version 3 specification is the support for digital signatures. By allowing UDDI entities to be digitally signed, a new level of data integrity and authenticity is delivered by UDDI. Inquirers of a registry can now filter their queries, only requesting data that has in fact been signed. When an inquirer then retrieves and verifies data from a registry, the inquirer can be confident that the data is exactly as the publisher intended it. Using the policy guide that is now part of the Version 3 specification, different UDDI implementations can mold a particular registry given its context. Some UDDI aspects that have been identified as policy decisions include the following: authorization models, data custody and confidentiality, key generation, value set validation, subscription, user publication limits, and audit policy. V3 makes is much easier to search and discover a relevant services. Now it is possible to conduct multi-step queries, use new qualifiers, wildcards and also to sort and handle large result flows. The subscription API set also provides for tracking registry activity and has been updated to support multi-registry environments. In such a way, users can establish a subscription based on a specific query or set of entities that the user is interested in. In the case of a query-based subscription, if the result set changes within a given time span, the user is notified. In the case of entity-based subscription, if the contents of one of those entities were to change, the user is notified. UDDI Version 3 introduces the notions of root and affiliate registries. The existence of a root registry enables its affiliates to share data with the root registry and among themselves with the knowledge that keys remain unique. The notion of registry topologies is thus enabled..."

  • [April 15, 2004] "Using BPEL4WS in a UDDI Registry." By Claus von Riegen and Ivana Trickovic (SAP). OASIS UDDI Spec Technical Committee. Draft Technical Note. Document identifier: 'uddi-spec-tc-tn-bpel-20040415.doc'. April 15, 2004. 24 pages. "BPEL4WS abstract processes complement abstract WSDL interfaces describing behavioral aspects of Web services and providing data needed for integration with business partners. Abstract processes are used to specify the order in which business partners may invoke operations. Therefore it may be also of interest to exchange abstract processes between business partners. Software companies and standards bodies may use a UDDI registry to publish different types of services and business users may populate the registry with descriptions of services they support. BPEL4WS and WSDL may be used to describe service types, protocols that are supported and other deployment details. While it is certainly possible to publish BPEL4WS process definitions in a UDDI registry, no guidelines are available as of today, which specify a common approach for doing that. Without such a common approach, the certainty that users find BPEL4WS process definitions or Web services that implement a given part of such a definition is limited. This technical note provides guidelines for publishing BPEL4WS abstract processes in UDDI. The primary goals of mapping BPEL4WS artifacts to the UDDI model are to: (1) enable the automatic registration of BPEL4WS definitions in UDDI; (2) enable optimized and flexible UDDI queries based on specific BPEL4WS artifacts and metadata; (3) provide composability with the mapping described in the Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry, Version 2 Technical Note document..." See also "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)." [source .DOC]

  • [January 05, 2004] "WASP UDDI 4.6: Extra Features Add to a Solid Product." Reviewed by Brian R. Barbash (Computer Sciences Corporation, Consulting Group). In Web Services Journal Volume 4, Issue 1 (January 2004). If you're looking to deploy a UDDI registry that provides strong standards support, a capable API, and security and management capabilities, look no further than Systinet's WASP UDDI version 4.6. WASP UDDI is a UDDI server that supports UDDI specification versions 1 and 2 as well as the version 3 subscription API. Systinet has also added extensions to the core UDDI specification to provide additional functionality around management, security, inquiries, and other operations. The server can run on top of a number of databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, PostgreSQL, Sybase, Cloudscape, PointBase, and Hypersonic SQL (included)... Along with a full-featured Web interface, Systinet's WASP UDDI provides a rich, open-source client API written in Java that developers may leverage to create applications that interact with the UDDI repository. For this review, I will be focusing on the supplied Java API and exploring various pieces of the UDDI server's functionality... Both the Web interface and the Java API for the UDDI registry allow elements to be published to the registry. Out of the box, the UDDI registry is populated with sample data and a set of common taxonomies to support the tutorials and exercises in the documentation and allow services to be classified with existing industry standards... Systinet's WASP UDDI server is an easy-to-use, full-featured UDDI registry. In addition to providing support for versions 1 and 2, as well as parts of the version 3 UDDI specification, several enhancements have been provided. The Java API is full featured and does an excellent job of hiding the communications details of interacting with the registry. The additional security and administrative functions provide unique management capabilities for the product. Overall, Systinet's WASP UDDI server is a very solid product..." [print view]

  • [August 25, 2003]   UBR Operators Council Announces Beta Release of UDDI Business Registry for UDDI Version 3.0.    The UDDI Business Registry (UBR) Operators Council has announced the availability of beta nodes for Version 3 of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration specification. Composed of members from IBM, Microsoft, NTT Communications, and SAP, the UDDI Operators Council operates the UDDI Business Registry, collecting information from UDDI web services implementations and providing feedback to members of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee. The UDDI specification "enables businesses to quickly, easily, and dynamically find and transact with one another. UDDI enables a business to describe its business and its services, discover other businesses that offer desired services, and integrate with these other businesses." The UBR announcement highlights four key enhancements in the UDDI Business Registry based upon the UDDI Version 3.0 Committee Specification. (1) Support for User-Defined Keys allows users to create human readable values for keys based on the known concept of domain names. Version 3 recommends the usage of a key scheme based on DNS names rather than formatted Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) notation; this allows publishers to establish a key partition from a DNS record and then generate keys based on that partition. (2) In V3 the UDDI Business Registry (UBR) becomes a Root Registry: the UBR will serve as the recognized root registry for globally unique keys, where affiliate registries will be able to reserve UDDI keys. (3) Version 3 also introduces Portable Keys -- the ability to copy keys between registries without being altered, enabling public and private registries to import information from others. (4) Digital Signatures based upon the W3C/IETF Recommendation are now used. The addition of digital signature support for entities in UDDI enables clients to establish the veracity of data registered in the UBR. By allowing UDDI entities to be digitally signed, a new level of data integrity and authenticity is delivered by UDDI; inquirers of a registry can now filter their queries, only requesting data that has in fact been signed."

  • [August 21, 2003] "UDDI Operators Council Releases Version 3 of the UDDI Business Registry. Beta Version to Include Enhanced Functionality for Companies to Build Secure Web Services Registries. UDDI Operators SAP, IBM and Microsoft to Provide Beta APIs for Public Usage of UDDI Version 3 Free of Charge." - "The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Business Registry (UBR) Operators Council announced today the availability of UDDI Version 3 (V.3) beta nodes. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration protocol is one of the major building blocks that enable successful Web service deployments. UDDI creates a standard interoperable platform that enables companies and applications to quickly, easily and dynamically find and use Web services. 'The beta release of UBR V.3 takes a further step in bringing this important specification closer to successful real-world implementations,' said Charles Abrams, research director, Gartner Research. 'The UDDI Operators Council is providing companies with an early opportunity to explore new functionality when considering extended Web service implementations.' The UDDI V.3 Specification brings the following important capabilities to the UBR: (1) User-Defined Keys: This allows users to create human readable values for keys based on the known concept of domain names. (2) UDDI Business Registry (UBR) as a Root Registry: Once the UBR migrates to V.3, the UBR will serve as the recognized root registry for globally unique keys, where affiliate registries will be able to reserve UDDI keys. (3) Portable Keys: V.3 introduces the ability to copy keys between registries without being altered, enabling public and private registries to import information from others. (4) Digital Signatures: The addition of digital signature support for entities in UDDI enables clients to establish the veracity of data registered in the UBR. UDDI is a cross-industry effort driven by major platform and software providers, as well as marketplace operators and e-business leaders within the OASIS standards consortium. IBM, Microsoft and SAP will provide UDDI V.3 beta nodes. With this beta, the UBR operators continue to provide validation of the UDDI specification through early reference implementations. Early availability of new V.3 features affords tool providers and early adopters publicly available access to this technology. The UDDI Operators Council, which consists of IBM, Microsoft, NTT Communications and SAP, continues to provide support for the momentum in the developer community to harness real-world implementations of the advanced specification. The Operators Council documents and submits their experience with the beta implementation to the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee to help refine and improve the UDDI V.3 Specification..."

  • [July 14, 2003] "Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry, Version 2.0." By John Colgrave (IBM) and Karsten Januszewski (Microsoft). Edited by Anne Thomas Manes and Tony Rogers (Computer Associates). Technical Note produced by the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee. Document Identifier: uddi-spec-tc-tn-wsdl-v2. 42 pages. According to a posting from Tom Bellwood Tom Bellwood (Co-Chair, OASIS UDDI Specification TC), this document was approved as a Committee Technical Note. Send comments to uddi-spec-comment@lists.oasis-open.org. Summary: "This document is an OASIS UDDI Technical Note that defines a new approach to using WSDL in a UDDI Registry." From the Introduction: " The Universal Description, Discovery & Integration (UDDI) specification provides a platform-independent way of describing and discovering Web services and Web service providers. The UDDI data structures provide a framework for the description of basic service information, and an extensible mechanism to specify detailed service access information using any standard description language. Many such languages exist in specific industry domains and at different levels of the protocol stack. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is a general purpose XML language for describing the interface, protocol bindings, and the deployment details of network services. WSDL complements the UDDI standard by providing a uniform way of describing the abstract interface and protocol bindings of arbitrary network services. The purpose of this document is to clarify the relationship between the two and to describe a recommended approach to mapping WSDL descriptions to the UDDI data structures. Consistent and thorough WSDL mappings are critical to the utility of UDDI... The primary goals of this mapping are: (1) To enable the automatic registration of WSDL definitions in UDDI; (2) To enable precise and flexible UDDI queries based on specific WSDL artifacts and metadata; (3) To maintain compatibility with the mapping described in the Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry, Version 1.08 Best Practice document; (4) To provide a consistent mapping for UDDI Version 2 and UDDI Version 3; (5) To support any logical and physical structure of WSDL description. This mapping prescribes a consistent methodology to map WSDL 1.1 artifacts to UDDI structures. It describes an approach that represents reusable, abstract Web service artifacts, (WSDL portTypes and WSDL bindings) and Web service implementations (WSDL services and ports). Tools can use this mapping to generate UDDI registrations automatically from WSDL descriptions. This mapping captures sufficient information from the WSDL documents to allow precise queries for Web services information without further recourse to the source WSDL documents, and to allow the appropriate WSDL documents to be retrieved once a match has been found. Given that the source WSDL documents can be distributed among the publishers using a UDDI registry, a UDDI registry provides a convenient central point where such queries can be executed... This document builds on Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry, Version 1.08, providing an expanded modeling practice that encompasses the flexibility of WSDL. The primary difference between this mapping and the one described in the existing Best Practice is that this mapping provides a methodology to represent individual Web services artifacts."

  • [April 15, 2003] "Using Categorization To Distinguish Entries And Create Communities in UDDI. Developing and Using a Validation Service for Checked Categories in UDDI." By Matt Rutkowski, Andrew Hately, and Robert Chumbley (UDDI Development, Emerging Technologies, IBM). From IBM developerWorks, Web services. April 2, 2003. ['This article describes the power of categorization in UDDI to differentiate data according to standard taxonomies and how to use categorization to create a subset of the registry that has been screened by an external party. The use of the UDDI validation service to create the Speed-start Web services community within the IBM UDDI Test registry is described in this article. This Speed-start community is an example of a set of public data that can be distinguished from all of the remaining public data within the same UDDI registry using a simple category based query. UDDI entries that are returned as part of the response to that query have been evaluated at publication time by the Speed-start validation service to ensure that they are Internet accessible Web services.'] "UDDI provides a mechanism to include standard taxonomies that can be used to describe each entry using as many industry standard search terms as needed. Each business, service, or technical model can contain a 'Category Bag' which holds keyed references (that is, categorization codes, locators, or keywords) that can specifically describe its type of business, physical location, and even the exact products and services it offers. These keyed references contain a reference to the classification system or taxonomy, a text field containing the value within that taxonomy and a text field for a human readable description. Using this method of categorization, the UDDI Inquiry API can quickly and efficiently connect businesses and services to exactly the customers that need them... Three of the UDDI taxonomies [NAICS, UNSPSC, GCS] are standards for categorizing entries. The fourth taxonomy, UDDI classifications, is a taxonomy that was developed as part of the UDDI specification to provide useful values for categorizing the technical information of Web services. The last taxonomy is useful for associating keywords with an entry, especially those that are not part of the name of the entry. Each of these category systems is uniquely identified by a UDDI entry called a tModel (Technical Model) and can be referenced using its tModelKey... The article provides a general overview of categorization and how it can be used in conjunction with validation services called by UDDI registries to provide a community or screened set of results according to category system specific criteria. The example of the Speed-start community is a simple example of the power of contextual validation services that can greatly enhance the quality of results corresponding to queries for data referencing a particular category or identifier system. Using the information in this article, it should be possible to develop services that greatly enhance the results from UDDI registries such as service quality or reference services..."

  • [April 09, 2003] "This Could Be the Year for UDDI. IBM Exec Touts Upcoming Upgrade." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (April 09, 2003). "An upcoming version of UDDI could give the Web services directory technology the boost it needs to spur adoption, according to an IBM official at a conference on Wednesday. Version 3 of UDDI, which actually was formulated last summer, is likely to be voted on by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) later this year, said Tom Bellwood, senior technology staff member in IBM's emerging technologies group and co-chairman of an OASIS technical committee on UDDI. Bellwood gave a presentation on UDDI Version 3 at the IBM developerWorksLive conference... Version 3 will help UDDI be adopted more in publicly available applications rather than the private, behind the firewall where it has primarily been used, said Bellwood during an interview following his presentation. 'In a public environment, I think that it needs a lot of the features in Version 3,' he said, citing features such as security and a multi-registry model. The security model in Version 3 allows for use of digital signatures and for querying based on data that has been signed. Digital signatures bring trust, integrity, and reliability to UDDI, Bellwood said. Users also can find out who published a specific directory item and data can be moved between registries. 'I think Version 3 is probably the basis for which really all UDDI work will be done' in the future, Bellwood said. The multi-registry feature enables private and public registries that can interact with each other. There will be root and affiliate registries, with root registry acting as authority for key spaces, which are analogous to DNS names. The root registry delegates key partitions. Affiliate registries follow rules of a particular root registry and are important for sharing of information but not replication... Additionally, Version 3 is schema-driven, in which schemas have been separated for improved interoperability, Bellwood said. Version 3 also enables development of industry-specific taxonomies, has peer-based replication for improved scaling, and has improved internationalization..." See the UDDI Version 3 Features List.

  • [March 21, 2003] "Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry, Version 2.0." Edited by Anne Thomas Manes and Tony Rogers. Technical Note produced for the OASIS UDDI Specifications TC. Document identifier: uddi-spec-tc-tn-wsdl-20030319-wd. Announced in a posting by John Colgrave; comments are welcome for the next thirty days. The TN defines a new approach to using WSDL in a UDDI Registry. "The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification provides a platform-independent way of describing and discovering Web services and Web service providers. The UDDI data structures provide a framework for the description of basic service information, and an extensible mechanism to specify detailed service access information using any standard description language. Many such languages exist in specific industry domains and at different levels of the protocol stack. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is a general purpose XML language for describing the interface, protocol bindings, and the deployment details of network services. WSDL complements the UDDI standard by providing a uniform way of describing the abstract interface and protocol bindings of arbitrary network services. The purpose of this document is to clarify the relationship between the two and to describe a recommended approach to mapping WSDL descriptions to the UDDI data structures. Consistent and thorough WSDL mappings are critical to the utility of UDDI. The primary goals of this mapping are: (1) To enable the automatic registration of WSDL definitions in UDDI; (2) To enable precise and flexible UDDI queries based on specific WSDL artifacts and metadata (3) To maintain compatibility with the mapping described in the Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry, Version 1.08 Best Practice document; (4) To provide a consistent mapping for UDDI Version 2 and UDDI Version 3; (5) To support any logical and physical structure of WSDL description. This mapping prescribes a consistent methodology to map WSDL 1.1 artifacts to UDDI structures. It describes an approach that represents reusable, abstract Web service artifacts, (WSDL portTypes and WSDL bindings) and Web service implementations (WSDL services and ports). Tools can use this mapping to generate UDDI registrations automatically from WSDL descriptions. This mapping captures sufficient information from the WSDL documents to allow precise queries for Web services information without further recourse to the source WSDL documents, and to allow the appropriate WSDL documents to be retrieved once a match has been found. Given that the source WSDL documents can be distributed among the publishers using a UDDI registry, a UDDI registry provides a convenient central point where such queries can be executed..." Also in PDF format. [cache]

  • [March 04, 2003]   UDDI Version 2 Specification Submitted for Approval as an OASIS Open Standard.    On behalf of the OASIS UDDI Specifications Technical Committee, TC Co-Chairs Tom Bellwood and Luc Clément have submitted the UDDI v2 Committee Specifications for consideration as an OASIS Open Standard. UDDI v2 components include the UDDI Version 2 API Specification, Data Structure, XML Schema, Replication Specification, XML Replication Schema, XML Custody Schema, Operator's Specification, WSDL Service Interface Descriptions, and UDDI tModels. "Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, or UDDI, is the name of a group of web-based registries that expose information about a business or other entity and its technical interfaces (or APIs). These registries are run by multiple Operator Sites, and can be used by anyone who wants to make information available about one or more businesses or entities, as well as anyone that wants to find that information. There is no charge for using the basic services of these operator sites." Updated announcement 2003-05-20: "UDDI v2 Ratified as OASIS Open Standard. Building Block for Web Services Advances Within Open Process."

  • [February 26, 2003] "Providing a Value Set For Use in UDDI Version 3." Edited by Claus von Riegen (SAP). With contributions from Tom Bellwood (IBM). TC Technical Note produced by the UDDI Specification Technical Committee. Document identifier: uddi-spec-tc-tn-valuesetprovider-20030212. Abstract: "Through the use of value sets in UDDI registries, businesses are able to find each other and the services that meet their needs. This document provides guidelines for providers of value sets on how to model, register, and validate their value sets for use in UDDI Version 3." Topic: "In UDDI, a value set represents a set of values that can be used to provide meaning or context to a UDDI entity. Category, identifier, and relationship type systems are all value sets. Value sets play an important role within UDDI, because it is through their use that businesses are able to find each other and the services that meet their needs.... This paper guides the providers of value sets in the creation of value set services and in the registration of the value sets and these external value set services, following the recommended policies outlined in Chapter 9 of the UDDI Version 3 Specification..." Note: A 2003-02-24 posting from Tom Bellwood and Luc Clément (Co-chairs, OASIS UDDI Specification TC) reported that this document had been approved as a UDDI Spec TC Technical Note.

  • [February 25, 2003] "UDDI Finds a Role After All." By Keith Rodgers. From LooselyCoupled.com. (February 20, 2003). "Two years after the fanfare of its introduction, UDDI adoption levels remain low. But users are beginning to see UDDI directories filling a practical role: adoption of UDDI is growing among web services pioneers; directory capabilities become more critical as the volume of services increases; but UDDI's origins have left design challenges; most users will acquire UDDI as a component of their web services platform... The latest specification of UDDI, version 3, has moved on from its B2B origins, adding features designed to meet users' needs for private registries. These include, for example, procedures for putting security keys into requests, or for enabling information transfer from one private registry to another. That said, the twists and turns in UDDI's evolution have also influenced its design and left some technical oddities. UDDI defines three registry components, which in layman's terms are akin to the Yellow Pages phone book -- or more precisely, to the trio of white, yellow and green pages. The white pages list companies' contact details and the key services they provide; the yellow pages categorize businesses using agreed taxonomies, including where they operate; and the green pages provide the technical data other companies need in order to take advantage of the services on offer. These three components will become useful to various individuals when organizations start to run between 20 to 50 services, suggests Mukund Balasubramanian, founder and chief technology officer of Infravio. Developers, for example, will require information about services as they're built -- what resources went in, what configurations were used and so forth. System administrators will want to look at the services from the perspective of how they were deployed -- which servers they're running on, for example, and what the loads are. The business user taxonomy, meanwhile, will help end users find the services they need... Increasingly, the question of how and when to adopt UDDI will be taken by the vendors rather than their customers. A private UDDI registry is already built into the latest release of IBM's WebSphere web service platform, and other vendors are not far behind. This may save organizations the trouble of getting their heads round what UDDI is or why it's important, but it will leave questions such as managing service quality and the degree of interoperability with other platforms unresolved. Ironically, those were the very same problems that stopped enterprises from eagerly adopting the B2B hubs of the dot-com boom. UDDI may have secured its place in the web services firmament by sidestepping such issues, but customers won't find it so easy to avoid facing up to them..."

  • [February 04, 2003] "What's New in UDDI 3.0 - Part 2." By Frank Sommers. From WebServices.Org. February 03, 2003. ['The second in a series of articles that provide an in-depth review of the most recent UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) Web service registry standard.'] "While the description of data structures takes up about half of Version 1 and 2 of the UDDI specifications, the other half defines the manner in which you can interact with those data structures. That interaction occurs via UDDI's public, or programmer's, API. That API is grouped into API sets according to functionality. The UDDI specifications define those API sets via the XML messages that must exchange between a UDDI registry and a registry client. Those XML messages are transmitted via the SOAP protocol... The most important API sets define the publishing and querying operations for a UDDI registry... Versions 3's most significant API changes concern the addition of four new API sets, and modifications to the semantics of existing API functions. The latest changes result from feedback during UDDI's two years of history, and aim to ease the development of business-to-business e-commerce applications... The UDDI 3 subscription API allows WidgetsRUs to be automatically notified when a new supplier publishes its Web service, or when an existing supplier's Web service registration changes. That eliminates the need for periodic administrative querying of UDDI, and makes incorporating new suppliers in the internal MIS system more timely... Note that the UDDI 3 subscription API is an optional API set: A UDDI registry is not required to support it. While it is a very useful feature in support of business-to-business e-commerce, it remains to be seen how many UDDI 3-compliant registries will offer it..." See also: (1) "What's New in UDDI 3.0 - Part 1"; (2) "UDDI Version 3 Features List".

  • [December 11, 2002] "Novell Adds Secure Identity Management to Key Web Services Standard." - "On December 11, 2002 Novell announced the availability to developers of a new Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) server that adds secure identity management to the UDDI standard. Novell Nsure UDDI Server is based on Novell's market-leading eDirectory software and is the first deliverable of the company's Destiny roadmap for eDirectory. Novell has extended its secure identity management expertise to a key Web services standard to help businesses more easily and confidently deploy Web services. The company today announced the availability to developers of a new Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) server that adds secure identity management to the UDDI standard, bolstering the security and simplifying the management of Web services registries. Novell Nsure UDDI Server is based on Novell's market-leading eDirectory software and is the first deliverable of the company's Destiny roadmap for eDirectory. Since its inception in 2000, adoption of the UDDI standard has been limited, partly because initial Web services deployments have been relatively small, but also because the standard lacks adequate provisions to ensure the security and management of registered services. With the delivery of a UDDI server based on eDirectory, Novell is attacking those limitations head on... Novell Nsure UDDI Server allows businesses to register Web services and make them available to internal or external users, while leveraging the security and management inherent in eDirectory. Users, whether publishing or consuming services, can be required to first authenticate to the directory and verify their identity. Equally important, those users, their access rights, and the registered Web services can be easily managed with eDirectory tools like Novell iManager, which are familiar to most network administrators... Novell Nsure UDDI Server will be available December 17, 2002 for free download..."

  • [December 02, 2002] "Traversing the Tree: Using the 'get_relatedCategories' API in UDDI Services." By Karsten Januszewski (Microsoft Corporation; UDDI Blog). From Microsoft MSDN Library. November 2002. ['Karsten Januszewski explains how and why to use the get_relatedCategories API, an extension API for accessing and retrieving a list of values within a given categorization scheme in a Microsoft UDDI node. '] "The ability to use categorization schemes to classify data in Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is key to the UDDI mission of description and discovery. While the ability to categorize UDDI entries is a core part of the UDDI specification, the specification provides no API facility for querying to retrieve a list of values within a given categorization scheme. In order to address this need, Microsoft UDDI nodes (both the publicly available UDDI Business Registry node as well as private UDDI Services nodes available in Microsoft Windows .NET Server 2003) provide an extension API for accessing this information called the get_relatedCategories API. This paper explains how and why to use this API. There are several reasons why one might want to gain access to the set of values of a categorization scheme in UDDI: (1) Writing custom user interfaces to UDDI; (2) Providing categorization metadata when installing applications that register themselves in UDDI; (3) Using UDDI to dynamically configure applications; one scenario for using UDDI is as an abstract layer between Web services and their clients. In particular, clients might query UDDI at run time to determine the best service to bind to. Because those queries may be based on categorization information, the client may need to dynamically navigate a categorization scheme to discover services... The get_relatedCategories API is a powerful enhancement to UDDI provided with the Microsoft UDDI Services shipping with Windows .NET Server 2003. It allows developers to access and traverse the hierarchy of a taxonomy that has been imported into a UDDI Services instance, giving developers the freedom to create applications that take advantage of the UDDI metadata strategy..." Note in this connection the posting by Luc Clément in response to the question "Do we have a schema to describe a taxonomy with all parent-child relationships, possible values and all?" -- [Luc:] "Unfortunately, there is nothing that has been published by the UDDI.org Working Group or this TC to date. This is clearly an area that deserves some attention. To support the needs of Microsoft's UDDI customers, Microsoft has created a schema and an API to navigate and retrieve valued from a given value set. The API is entitled the get_relatedCategories. The schema used to support these value sets is available at http://uddi.microsoft.com/extensions.xsd..." See also "The Importance of Metadata: Reification, Categorization and UDDI." [cache .XSD]

  • [December 02, 2002] "Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry." UDDI Spec TC Best Practice document. Reference: Version 1.08, uddi-spec-tc-bp-using-wsdl-v108-20021110. 12 pages. Edited by John Colgrave (IBM) and Karsten Januszewski (Microsoft). Contributors: Francisco Curbera (IBM), David Ehnebuske (IBM), and Dan Rogers (Microsoft). A posting from Luc Clément (Co-chair, OASIS UDDI Spec TC) announced the results of a TC vote which approved version 1.08 of Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry as a Best Practice document. A Best Practice "is a non-normative document accompanying a UDDI Specification that provides guidance on how to use UDDI registries. Best Practices not only represent the UDDI Spec TC's view on some UDDI-related topic, but also represent well-established practice." Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry "describes the current Best Practice for constructing UDDI entities from, or relating to, WSDL descriptions of web services." From the Introduction: "The Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification provides a platformindependent way of describing services, discovering businesses, and integrating business services using the Internet. The UDDI data structures provide a framework for the description of basic business and service information, and architects an extensible mechanism to provide detailed service access information using any standard description language. Many such languages exist in specific industry domains and at different levels of the protocol stack. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is a general purpose XML language for describing the interface, protocol bindings and the deployment details of network services. WSDL complements the UDDI standard by providing a uniform way of describing the abstract interface and protocol bindings of arbitrary network services. The purpose of this document is to clarify the relationship between the two, describe how WSDL can be used to help create UDDI business service descriptions."

  • [October 14, 2002] "UDDI and WSIL for e-Science." By Rob Allan, Dharmesh Chohan, Xiao Dong Wang, Mark McKeown, John Colgrave, and Matthew Dovey. From the CLRC e-Science Centre and Distributed Computing Programme. ['A UK e-Science UDDI registry is being developed to integrate e-Science projects and Virtual Organisations into a Web and Grid services framework. This paper provides the technical background to this project, which complements other sources of information such as the NeSC project database.'] "In this paper we describe how an private UK e-Science UDDI registry or Web Services Inspection document hosted by the Grid Support Centre might be used to register information about e-Science Virtual Organisations and to enable inter-working between them by exposing their contacts and service points. We propose using UDDI and WSIL to provide APIs for information about UK e-Science projects and also show how individual projects might use the same technology. Examples of the latter are the CLRC Integrated e-Science Environment project (IeSE) and EPSRC's MyGrid. These show how UDDI could be used within a single e-Science project for discovery of its own businessEntities and services by high-level components such as applications and portals. We believe that by providing interfaces to e-Science projects using (proposed) Web services standards, such as UDDI and WSIL, it will facilitate commercial uptake. A partly moderated top-level service will build confidence, allow for testing but still provide the capability to register with the worldwide Universal Business Registry via the publisherAssertion capability as projects become more mature and wish to expose their services to international partners. It nevertheless remains to be seen how the proposed services could be used to enable electronic contract negotiation via the so-called 'tModels'. Finally, appendices describe UDDI and WSIL implementations and a proposed architecture for accessing Web services through a firewall using a proxy service. Implementations of this architecture will show if the performance is acceptable for a variety of purposes... We outline how UDDI might be used as a programmatic Web services information directory for e-Science projects and for services within a single project providing its community with multiple 'views' of sub-projects. UDDI will probably need to be supplemented with a 'top-level' WSIL document accessible from the UK Grid Support Centre Web site. The UDDI and WS-Inspection sources can be cross referenced. A private UDDI for the projects of the UK e-Science Programme offers the chance to test the publication of Web services and provide some degree of assurance that the published services will be acceptable to the wider community. Services may also be published to the Universal Business Registry and the publisherAssertion mechanism of UDDI v3.0 can be used to guarantee that they do belong to the programme..." [PDF format, cache]

  • [October 09, 2002] "A Global Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration Repository Is Unlikely Part of Web Services in Short Term, Says IDC." By [IDC Staff]. Summary from IDC Bulletin #27838 "UDDI in the eMarketplace: The Right Role for the Repository?," by Rob Hailstone. August 20002. "The concept of a global universal, description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) repository has received much criticism as a standard component of Web services architecture due to the lack of business demand for such an implementation. According to IDC, the need for a UDDI repository is apparent at the corporate level, but on a global scale it is difficult to envision how a repository could be policed such that it serves as a benefit, rather than hazard, to business. 'The secret lies in the repository being operated by a trusted third party, and the most likely type of organization to fill this role will be the emarketplace,' said Rob Hailstone, director of IDC's Systems Infrastructure Software research. 'IDC believes that repositioning emarketplaces around Web services and featuring the UDDI repository would be viable within the next two to three years. However, initial adoption rates are likely to be low until demand is driven by leading user organizations.' According to IDC, the second phase of Web services deployment, where usage is predominantly between organizations, has to be successful if the more visionary later phases are to have any chance of becoming reality. UDDI will play an important role enabling this second phase, but implementation must be in a controlled manner if the expected benefits are to be achieved. IDC believes that UDDI deployment within the infrastructure of emarketplaces provides the level of control required within a format that creates business benefits for service providers and consumers as well as the operators of emarketplaces..."

  • [October 08, 2002]   NTT Communications Launches Asia's First UDDI Registry.    NTT Communications Corporation has announced the October 9, 2002 launch of "Asia's first UDDI Business Registry based on the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specifications, joining IBM, Microsoft and SAP in providing a completely open public registry with a standard access method for companies to register their services and search for business partners' services online." In July 2002 NTT Com and IBM announced a collaborative arrangement for building NTT Com's UDDI Business Registry using IBM's WebSphere and DB2 products and technologies. "The UDDI Business Registry is an online directory that enables companies to register, search and dynamically share information completely free of charge. NTT Com joined the UDDI Operators Council in December 2001 to become Asia's first UDDI Business Registry node operator. Information is registered in a unified format as defined by the UDDI specifications. Information registered in the database of each registry node operator is regularly copied to the other operators' databases, assuring a consistent, worldwide network of registered information. As part of registering its own services in the registry, NTT Com plans to develop new business-to-business (B2B) Web Services and thereby establish the company as a new leader in this field. Like the registries currently operated by IBM, Microsoft and SAP, NTT Com's registry will be based on the UDDI Version 2 specifications." [Full context]

  • [September 30, 2002]   IBM alphaWorks Releases UDDI Registry Extensions.    An IBM alphaWorks development team has released a package of extensions that enhance IBM WebSphere UDDI product with advanced search capabilities. These UDDI Registry Extensions support Version 1.1.1 of the IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry. The new UDDI Registry Extensions provide "advanced search capabilities that enable the formation of complex queries comprising search criteria from two standard UDDI 'find' APIs, find_business and find_service, all in one query. With these advanced search capabilities, requesters can find businesses with services of specific names or in a specific category and vice versa to find services owned by businesses that match specified criteria. Such capabilities are not available with current UDDI search technology and these searches cannot be done without much effort. To make equivalent queries with the current UDDI search technology, the client search requester must perform two steps: (1) Issue two queries: a find_business query and a find_service query, and (2) Process the two sets of results returned by the queries and perform the appropriate intersection of the results, which is complex and error-prone." [Full context]

  • [September 19, 2002] "The Importance of Metadata: Reification, Categorization and UDDI." By Karsten Januszewski (Microsoft Corporation). From the Microsoft XML Web Services Developer Center (September 2002). ['Look behind the UDDI metadata structure to see how to best employ it within a UDDI registry, both in the UDDI Business Registry (UBR) and in UDDI Services of Microsoft Windows .NET Server; see how to create custom categorization schemes that allow users to solve particular problems in description and discovery.'] "Categorization is arguably the most important feature of Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), yet it is the least understood. The ability to attribute metadata to services registered in UDDI, and then run queries based on that metadata is absolutely central to the purpose of UDDI at both design time and run time. This article will explain the thinking behind the UDDI metadata structure and then demonstrate how to best employ that metadata structure within a UDDI registry, both in the UDDI Business Registry (UBR) and in UDDI Services of Windows .NET Server. It explains how to create custom categorization schemes that allow users to solve particular problems in description and discovery... UDDI provides typed metadata through several means: First, three of the four central entities in UDDI (providers, services and tModels) can be adorned with what might be thought of as property bags: collections of typed name/value pairs that describe that given entity. Each of the properties in the bag comes from a known classification system... Adorning UDDI entities with these property bags provides entities with the critical metadata and context that can be used to discover and consume them. The corollary to adorning an entity with properties is the ability to search for that entity based on those properties. The UDDI API was designed to support a complex range of queries based on metadata ascribed to these bags. Queries are written that look for properties based on the classification scheme they are associated with. In other words, in writing a query "to find services in the United States", one must provide not only the appropriate value that represents the United States but also the classification scheme from which that value originates. In this way, queries can be written that have contextual intelligence about the properties being searched for. Other features make the UDDI query engine able to handle a range of scenarios. For example, queries can do an exact match of all the properties in a bag or can match just one property in a bag. Or, a query can search across bags contained in both providers and services. The querying capacity in the UDDI API provides a great deal of flexibility in terms of writing focused, precise queries. Through these two parallel facilities -- adorning properties to entities and searching for entities based on well-known properties -- UDDI entities are reified. Below, the article will delve into exactly how to accomplish this... Classification and typed metadata is key to the ability of UDDI to solve the problems of reification of data both in the enterprise and in the public sphere. Well-architected Web service software applications will employ UDDI as an infrastructure, taking advantage of the many possibilities of employing this complex categorization system to different entities for both design-time and run-time usage..."

  • [September 10, 2002] "Finding the Right Formula For UDDI. Web-services Specification to Play Key Role." By Jeffrey Schwartz. In VARBusiness (September 06, 2002). "As customers start using Web services to link disparate applications, they will need a way to efficiently organize and keep track of all those Web services. Most experts believe they will do that through repositories based on a specification called universal description and discovery interface (UDDI). Some believe UDDI will be as pervasive in directories and repositories as XML is in defining metadata and SOAP is in encapsulating software components. Simply put, UDDI makes it possible to search any registry for specific Web services, such as business rules and SOAP-based components. In addition to helping users and applications find specific Web services, UDDI will allow them to query data that describes how those services are used. 'UDDI is really a registry of Web services, wherever they're deployed, and descriptions of how to interact with them,' says Chris Kurt, program manager for UDDI.org at Microsoft and a member of Microsoft's XML standards team. UDDI also specifies a set of APIs to interact with the registry and provides references on how to interface with applications. UDDI registries have basic white and yellow pages models for finding services. Solution providers will increasingly find UDDI implemented in various forms of repositories, including application servers, middleware, databases and directories. IBM is already shipping a UDDI registry based on its WebSphere application server suite; Novell recently announced plans to release a UDDI server by year's end that will run atop its eDirectory software; and Microsoft's forthcoming .Net servers will support UDDI through microcode in the new server platforms and via its SQL Server database. While UDDI will be key to tying together Web services, the market is still nascent. 'Everyone's trying to get mind share,' says Michael Neuenschwander, an analyst at the Burton Group. In July, work on UDDI was turned over to Oasis, a standards body that governs e-business and Web-services standards, including XML. The move coincided with the release of version 3 of the UDDI spec, which gives the standard key enterprise capabilities, such as support for XML-based security and policy management, internationalization and a subscription API that generates messages when changes are made to a UDDI repository. And late last month, Oasis announced the formation of a technical committee that will develop the technical standards and best practices. Members of the technical committee include BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun and Verisign, among others... In order for Web services to proliferate, customers and solution providers should be looking at UDDI as a key component of that infrastructure. Sutor describes it as a catch-22. 'You need to have a registry to get the growth of Web services, but you need a whole bunch of Web services to put in the registry to make it useful,' Sutor says. So, what will make UDDI useful? It's likely to proliferate within organizations for sharing business logic among applications. For example, Microsoft's Kurt says, if an enterprise wants to make a change-of-address service originally built for an HR application for other apps, a UDDI registry can help internal developers, or even end users, find the software components and business rules for using those programs..."

  • [August 30, 2002] "UDDI Takes Step Forward but Isn't Ready for Deployment." By Ray Wagner and John Pescatore (Gartner Research). Gartner FirstTake. Reference: FT-18-0859. 30 August 2002. ['Most major IT vendors support OASIS's new committee to develop the UDDI protocol. However, UDDI will achieve widespread use only at a late stage in the deployment of Web services.'] "On 28 August 2002, the Organization for Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced the UDDI Specification Technical Committee to oversee the development of Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), a Web service protocol. More than 20 major IT companies have said they will participate, including most major software infrastructure providers... The unprecedented cooperation by industry participants will do much to secure widespread acceptance of UDDI, which provides a common format for enterprises to identify and link to new Web services... However, this specification may not prove as important as other Web service protocols with which it is normally associated, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), because UDDI will achieve widespread use only at a late stage in the deployment of Web services. In general, enterprises will not need UDDI initially, either behind the firewall or when they deal with trusted business partners. Supporters will have to resolve many security issues related to UDDI before enterprises can safely expose service information via UDDI. Standard mechanisms need to be defined for such functions as supporting granular access, denial-of-service protection and nonrepudiation. Gartner recommends that enterprises evaluate the output of the UDDI committee for in-depth treatment of UDDI security issues before planning externally exposed use of UDDI. Gartner also believes that secure use of Web services will greatly accelerate if the vendors participating in the UDDI committee also participate aggressively in the SAML, Web Services Security (WS-Security), Liberty Alliance and other Web service initiatives related to security..." Also in PDF format [cache]

  • [August 29, 2002]   OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee Continues Work on Web Services Registry Foundations.    A UDDI Specification Technical Committee has been formed within the OASIS UDDI Member Section to "continue work on the Web services registry foundations developed and published by UDDI.org." The new technical committee has been chartered to support: "specifications for Web services registries and Web service interfaces to the registries; replication or synchronization mechanisms across multiple implementations; and security facilities for access or manipulation of the registry and maintaining data integrity." Specifically, the OASIS UDDI Specification TC will: "(1) Accept as input the UDDI version 2.0 and 3.0 specifications published by the members of UDDI.org; (2) Produce as output a specification for Web Services Description, Discovery and Integration; this specification will reflect refinements and changes made to the submitted version of UDDI that are identified by the UDDI Specification TC members, and for additional functionality within the scope of the TC charter; (3) Liaise and/or forge relationships with other Web services efforts to assist in leveraging UDDI as a part of their specifications or solutions; (4) Coordinate with the chairs of the other related OASIS Technical Committees via Joint Committees as appropriate; (5) Coordinate with the UDDI Business Registry operators in order to get early feedback from their implementation experiences; (6) Oversee ongoing maintenance and errata of the UDDI specifications." Members of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee include BEA Systems, Cincom, Computer Associates, E2open, Entrust, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, IONA, Microsoft, MSI Business Solutions, NerveWire, Novell, Oracle, Perficient, SAP, SeeBeyond, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO, Verisign, webMethods, XML Global, and others. [Full context]

  • [August 29, 2002] "XML Web Services: Is the End Near?" By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (August 28, 2002). "For the second day in a row at the XML Web Services One conference here, a keynote speaker got up and signaled the impending end to the Web services era, at least on a standards level. Don Box, an architect in Microsoft Corp.'s developer division told an audience of Web services conference attendees Wednesday: 'The end of the XML Web services era is near. I predict two years from now we won't have this conference'... Box said Microsoft has been moving awfully fast with its Global XML Architecture (GXA) for Web services; an interoperability demonstration between IBM and Microsoft here at the conference [serves] as evidence that the technology is constantly improving... Box posed the question of why Microsoft is pursuing a Web services strategy. 'Because we hit the wall with the prior technology,' he said. He said Microsoft's COM (Component Object Model) and DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) hit the wall. 'On the XML front we needed a replacement for DCOM, so XML Web services is the way we went. Microsoft has bet the company on this thing and it is our intention to make all software integration based on Web services.' In addition, he said, some of the Web services standards are mature and need to be finalized. He said the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.3 is a bad idea because the specification covers all the necessary functionality for a SOAP implementation. 'SOAP 1.2 should be the end of the line,' he said. Box also said Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is the technology of the future, but that may change in 2003. Microsoft is shipping UDDI as part of its operating system, Box said..."

  • [August 26, 2002] "Registering and Discovering RSS Feeds in UDDI." By Karsten Januszewski (Microsoft Corporation). Microsoft White paper at GotDotNet. "The use of Universal, Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) to catalog and discover Rich Site Summary (RSS) news feeds is a logical application of UDDI in its mission of description and discovery of Web services. RSS is one of the most frequently used applications of XML on the Web today. It provides a standard way for organizations and individuals to distribute news on the Internet. One question that arises with RSS is the ability to discover the location of different RSS Feeds. The question of discovery and aggregation of RSS Feeds has the following requirements: (1) Programmatically publish an RSS Feed; (2) Associate metadata (classification, geography, ownership, etc.) with that RSS Feed in an extensible manner; (3) Query for RSS Feeds based on a number of parameters; (4) Perform requirements 1, 2, and 3 in an interoperable, programming language independent way. It is in meeting these requirements that UDDI serves as a solution. UDDI provides a mechanism to register RSS Feeds in a UDDI registry. UDDI has a flexible classification system that can be employed to attribute those feeds with a range of different metadata in an extensible way. Once RSS Feeds are registered in UDDI, users can query for those feeds deterministically across different metadata. Client RSS readers can query UDDI and aggregate different RSS Feeds based on classification information. And, lastly, UDDI is an interoperable, programming language independent service with a comprehensive XML SOAP API for both publication and inquiry." From the announcement: "... a white paper and code sample on registering RSS. Feeds in UDDI has been published. The paper walks through publishing and discovering RSS Feeds in UDDI, including a mapping between the two data models, the creation of well-known RSS tModels, and recommendations on classification. The code sample provides a sample .NET publication/aggregation tool based on the practice in the paper. An installable .msi file is provided, as is the source code for the C# WinForm. The application is meant only as a sample and is not optimized for usage. (There is no caching of feeds, for example, in the sample application.) Incidentally, a feed one might discover in UDDI according to the practice outlined in the paper is a web log I am maintaining on UDDI -- for the location of the feed, query UDDI based on the paper... The most difficult part of this exercise was modeling RSS version in UDDI. The paper opts for a particular solution; feedback and comments on the solution are welcomed..."

  • [August 22, 2002] "UDDI Should Flourish Under OASIS." By Dave Kearns. In Network World (August 14, 2002). Network World Directories Newsletter. "I'm not a big fan of UDDI because I think what it does can better (and more economically) be achieved with directory services -- even with DNS. But more and more directory vendors (such as Sun, Computer Associates and Novell) are tossing in the towel and simply developing UDDI front ends for their directory products rather than trying to convince the world that the UDDI repository isn't needed. That's probably the best way to go: Jump on the UDDI bandwagon, but bring the instrument (i.e., the directory) you already know how to play. Now that UDDI is in the OASIS house, the ability to work closely with the folks on the Directory Services Markup Language (DSML), Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML), Business Transactions (BTP), and the various Electronic Business Extensible Markup Language (ebXML) technical committees could go a long way toward making UDDI a usable, rather than just a theoretically possible, technology. In the call for members, UDDI Technical Committee co-chairs Tom Bellwood of IBM and Luc Clément of Microsoft state that the group's scope is 'the support of Web services discovery mechanisms in the following areas: (1) Specifications for Web services registries and Web service interfaces to the registries. (2) Replication or synchronization mechanisms across multiple implementations. (3) Security facilities for access or manipulation of the registry and maintaining data integrity.' Replication and synchronization are something the DSML folks have already started on. Access security was ably demonstrated by SAML recently. Specifying Web services interfaces is part of the purview of the ebXML committees. There is a lot of expertise available at OASIS, and the UDDI people should take advantage of it. Adapting someone else's initiative is very often much more efficient and productive than re-inventing the wheel..."

  • [August 20, 2002] "Java and UDDI Registries." By Paul Tremblett. In Dr Dobb's Journal [DDJ] (September 2002) #340, pages 34-40. "Applications that require web services send requests to services at advertised URLs. The service processes the request and returns the result. Applications obtain information about how to contact a service (along with other useful data) from business registries such as the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) project, a platform-independent open framework for describing services and and businesses and integrating them via the Internet. Currently more than 200 companies support UDDI... The tools needed to query a UDDI registry are available and easy to use, and the JAXM API is suitable for preparing SOAP messages... Paul Tremblett shows how your Java applications can contact business registries, such as UDDI, and retrieve information from them..." See the associated source code and listings.

  • [July 31, 2002] UDDI.org transition to OASIS and Invitation to Join the OASIS UDDI Open Comment. Message from Luc Clément (Microsoft, Program Manager, UDDI.org). We are pleased to announce that UDDI.org has transitioned its work to OASIS, becoming the newest OASIS Member Section. Fulfilling our original commitment to submit UDDI to a recognized standards organization, the UDDI Standards Transition Committee selected OASIS as the best match. We invite you to read the press release and visit the http://uddi.org site for additional information. As a valued member of the UDDI community, your ongoing participation in the OASIS UDDI Member Section is vital. In moving the UDDI work to OASIS, additional opportunities to participate in the specification development are now available. All members will be able to actively participate in all aspects of the specification design and development.

  • [July 30, 2002]   OASIS to Host UDDI Project Technical Work.    The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Project has announced the transition of its standards work to OASIS. OASIS will "serve as the steward for the UDDI project and activities and will continue development of the UDDI technical work" in a new technical committee. "This transition delivers on the goals laid out in the UDDI project's original charter. OASIS, a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards, will manage the future development of the UDDI specification and related activities. Existing business registries will continue to be made available by registry operators. Under OASIS, the UDDI specification will continue to advance as a standard, and interested companies can continue to incorporate the specification into future business and software plans. UDDI also will benefit from additional expertise in shaping, developing and coordinating the fundamentals for open standards based business interoperability. The UDDI Community is comprised of more than 300 business and technology leaders working together to enable companies and applications to quickly, easily, and dynamically find, and use Web services. As a part of the UDDI project, a UDDI Business Registry has been established to allow businesses to publish and discover Web services." [Full context]

  • [July 30, 2002] Announcement 2002-07-30: "Web Services Body UDDI.ORG Transitions Work to OASIS Standards Consortium. UDDI.org Delivers Version 3 Specification." — "The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) project, whose specification provides one of the building blocks for Web services applications and services, and OASIS, an industry standards body, have announced that OASIS will serve as the steward for the UDDI project and activities and will continue development of the UDDI technical work. This transition delivers on the goals laid out in the UDDI project's original charter. OASIS, a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards, will manage the future development of the UDDI specification and related activities. Existing business registries will continue to be made available by registry operators. Under OASIS, the UDDI specification will continue to advance as a standard, and interested companies can continue to incorporate the specification into future business and software plans. UDDI also will benefit from additional expertise in shaping, developing and coordinating the fundamentals for open standards based business interoperability. Along with the transition, UDDI.org also announced today the release of the version 3 specification. The new specification will be the basis for future development under OASIS. 'Version 3 provides the opportunity to make and mold UDDI registries for different purposes in different contexts, while maintaining a standard interoperable foundation,' said Chris Kurt, General Program Manager, UDDI.org. 'Additional features and enhancements such as those in the areas of security and internationalization are now included per requirements of implementers and end users, including the entire UDDI community.' The new version 3 specification offers a strong foundation for a diverse set of Web services architectures and delivers key enhancements, including: (1) Increased security features: Support for XML-based digital signatures, and XML-based policies are now managed in UDDI operations. (2) Improved Web Services Description Language (WSDL) support: Changes were made in the UDDI schema so WSDL-based web services can be found and run more easily. (3) Multi-registry topologies: Provides the ability to take web services registrations from a local registry and promote them to a private or public registry. (4) New subscription API and core information model advances: Allows UDDI users to receive proactive noticifations on services and changes to the UDDI registry..."

  • [July 26, 2002] "UDDI.org To Become OASIS Member." By Elizabeth Montalbano. In Computer Reseller News (CRN) (July 26, 2002). "UDDI.org will become a member of the OASIS technology standards consortium next week, officials for both organizations confirmed Friday. Officials said OASIS will publish the third version of the UDDI specification next week and that all further developments of the specifications will fall under OASIS's jurisdiction. Currently, Microsoft, IBM and Hewlett-Packard offer UDDI registries, and SAP and NTT Docomo have registries in development. It has not yet been decided whether the registries also will fall under OASIS control, said Chris Kurt, program manager for UDDI.org and a Microsoft official. Kurt said that OASIS taking the reins of the UDDI technology should give the industry assurance that UDDI is here to stay... The next step for UDDI 3.0 will be for OASIS members to form a technical committee charter around the technology, said Patrick Gannon, CEO and president of OASIS. Once that is passed, the first committee meeting will happen within 45 days, he said. Another Web services standard in OASIS, ebXML, also features a standard registry for Web services. Gannon said UDDI's inclusion in OASIS will not affect that work... UDDI.org was first launched as a joint initiative by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba in September 2000 to provide a standard way to identify trading partners' Web services. The group recently submitted its third version for review. Since UDDI's inception, a wide array of companies, among them Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems, have built and sold products that support UDDI. It is one of several XML-based standards for Web services, including WSDL and SOAP, that solution providers say will be key for the broad adoption of Web services in the industry..."

  • [July 26, 2002] "UDDI V.3 Coming Soon (To a Web Service Near You)." By [ComputerWire Staff]. In The Register (July 26, 2002). "... UDDI has been adopted by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for ratification as an independent standard. That announcement will also be made Tuesday [2002-07-30]. Backing from OASIS should ensure broader industry input into future versions of UDDI and potentially encourage broader up-take. UDDI has been the mandate of UDDI.org, whose members include American Express, BEA Systems Inc, Boeing, Cisco Systems Inc, Ford Motor Company and Fujitsu. UDDI was launched by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba Inc to describe and register businesses using XML, in an online database. Since its launch in September 2000 - the apex of the b2b, b2c and online market places boom - UDDI has seen mixed fortunes... This week public UDDI Business Registries from IBM, Microsoft and SAP AG adopted UDDI 2.0. NTT Communications is expected to launch its own registry this fall. Doubts remain, though. Hewlett-Packard Co signed an agreement to operate a registry, but that registry's future is in doubt after HP pulled out of Java middleware and web services. HP failed to return Computerwire calls for comment. Meanwhile, some early adopters are bypassing UDDI entirely. Deloitte Consulting principal and e-business chief technology officer Michael DeBellis reports early adopters are hard-coding together web services, by-passing UDDI and defeating the vision. UDDI faces an additional threat from Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Anecdotal evidence says some early adopters are putting web services data into directories based on LDAP, a well-established directory technology, instead of UDDI. Observers feel UDDI is in danger of being sidelined by events. 'We are seeing very few public UDDI registries. Where it is being used is behind the firewall,' DeBellis said. UDDI.org's answer is UDDI 3.0. The specification improves interoperability and replication between registries behind those firewalls. Siva Darivemula, strategic initiatives marketing manager for IBM's WebSphere marketing, said 3.0 is richer and contains more detailed descriptions than previous specifications..."

  • [July 26, 2002] "The Evolution of UDDI." By The Stencil Group, Inc. UDDI.org White Paper. July 19, 2002. 15 pages. "Although many aspects throughout the UDDI specification have matured in the version 3.0 release, the chief architectural change is the concept of 'registry interaction.' This shift reflects the increasing recognition that UDDI is one element of a larger set of web services technologies that support the design and operations of myriad software applications within and among business organizations. In short, just as each enterprise application embodies the specific characteristics of the business process it supports, so should the enabling technologies like UDDI support a variety of infrastructural permutations. For UDDI, this business requirement dictated an increased emphasis on providing a means to define the relationships among a variety of UDDI registries, not simply access to one, public registry of business services, the UBR. Although the UDDI specification included from the start concepts like replication and distribution among server peers, earlier definitions of the standard did not fully address the nuts-and-bolts required for the more sophisticated, hierarchical model now dictated... The Version 3 specification addresses several features that support an emphasis on registry interaction. While relatively little of the existing features have changed, a handful of key functional concepts have been added or expanded to accommodate the variety of new taxonomies. Some of the most important issues addressed in the Version 3 specification include: (1) Registration key generation and management; (2) Registration subscription API set; (3) XML digital signatures... Most elements of a registry record optionally may be signed using the DSIG specification maintained by the W3C. Thus, while the specification does not define specific policies around security and authorization, it does provide the means for specific implementations to provide for these needs. The primary benefit of digital signatures is to ensure that data has not been altered since it was signed and published, that ownership of a particular registry entity can be validated, and confidence that data transferred among registries can be assured..." See "UDDI Working Group Publishes UDDI Version 3.0 Specification."

  • [July 24, 2002] "UDDI.org Announces an Enhanced UDDI Business Registry. Multi-version UDDI Business Registry Goes Live." - "The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) project announced today that the UDDI Business Registry (UBR) -- public UDDI nodes that provide businesses a uniform way to describe their services, discover other companies' services, and understand the methods necessary to conduct e-business with a particular company -- is now compliant with Version 2 of the UDDI specification. The UBR is now a multi-version UDDI registry with support for V1 and V2 of the specification. The number of public node operators has also increased from two to three, with a fourth operator expected to release its node shortly. 'We've extended the initial vision of the UDDI Project, which was to create an open platform-independent specification that enables companies to transact with one another with ease,' stated Chris Kurt, general program manager for UDDI.org. 'Momentum for UDDI continues to grow as evidenced by the launching of additional UBR nodes and by the ever increasing number of registered services. The number of businesses registered among the three public UBR nodes recently surpassed 10,000 with over 4,000 individual Web services available. All registered data is now being replicated between the UBR nodes. This allows services registered in one UBR node to be discovered from any of the other UBR nodes.' With the availability of UDDI V2, enterprises will now benefit through improved programmatic access to UDDI data and stronger business relationship modeling. UDDI V2 enables more efficient access to UDDI registries, such as the UBR and private Web service registries, and bolsters users' confidence in the trustworthiness and legitimacy of businesses they find in the UDDI registries... The UDDI Community is comprised of more than 300 business and technology leaders working together to enable companies to quickly, easily, and dynamically find, and transact with one another. As a cornerstone of the emerging Web services architecture, UDDI will benefit businesses of all sizes by creating an open platform-independent specification. As a part of the UDDI project, a global business registry has been established to allow businesses to publish and discover Web services..." See the posting from George Zagelow (IBM Program Manager for UDDI, Managing Director, UDDI Operators Council).

  • [July 19, 2002] "NTT Com and IBM to Build Asia's First UDDI Business Registry." - "NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) and IBM Corporation announced today that the two companies will collaborate to construct NTT Com's UDDI Business Registry. This will be Asia's first Universal Description Discover and Integration Registry, and will use IBM's WebSphere and DB2 products and technologies. Joint construction will begin in mid-July and operations will commence in October this year. The UDDI Project is a worldwide initiative to enable businesses, irrespective of industry, to quickly, easily and dynamically find one another, leading potentially to new business-to-business e-commerce. UDDI enables a company to describe its business and services on the Internet, to discover other companies that offer desired services, and to negotiate and settle with those companies... The UDDI Business Registry is a global public online catalog for companies to register their business and the services they offer. The registry allows a business to easily locate a supplier to meet its needs and then to negotiate and settle e-transactions. It is a significant part of the framework supporting Web services. Today's joint announcement paves the way for commercial e-commerce expansion in the Asian region. In December 2001 NTT Com received approval to become Asia's first Business Registry node operator under the UDDI Project. NTT Com chose IBM based on IBM's leadership in advancing Web services standards and its comprehensive Web services-enabled product portfolio. 'As the first UDDI operator in Asia, NTT Com is dedicating its efforts to help customers and partners take advantage of Web services,' says Akira Kotani, vice president, Business Product Development and Marketing Department of NTT Com. NTT Com will base its Business Registry on IBM's model, and will translate the user interface and management code into Japanese. The registry will operate in IBM's WebSphere runtime environment and will use IBM's DB2 software for data repository, thereby enabling construction of the registry system based on Web services standards..." See also the diagram "NTT Com and IBM."

  • [July 17, 2002]   IBM alphaWorks Releases UDDI for Python Package (UDDI4Py).    The IBM alphaWorks development team has released a UDDI4Py Python package that "allows the sending of requests to and processing of responses from the UDDI Version 2 APIs. UDDI4Py supports access to the UDDI Registry by abstracting the underlying XML constructs and by the transmission/processing of the various SOAP API messages. It is meant to complement the UDDI tool kit available to the Java development community, and gives customers the alternative of using a different Web services development platform. UDDI4Py is not for the development of Web Services, but rather for discovering and/or publishing the technical interfaces that describe specific Web services using the UDDI Registry. UDDI4Py supplies glue that allows Python applications to dynamically discover and/or publish Web services to and from the public registry. The rapid application development that the Python language provides is leveraged by any system working within the Web services arena and utilizing the UDDI4Py package." See general references in "XML and Python." [Full context]

  • [July 03, 2002]   UDDI Working Group Publishes UDDI Version 3.0 Specification.    A posting from Luc Clément of Microsoft announces that the UDDI Working Group and Advisors Group has released the UDDI Version 3 Specification, Open Draft for public review. UDDI Version 3 "delivers upon the roadmap and requirements outlined at the launch of UDDI in September 2000, to develop a secure, general-purpose registry for Web services. UDDI V3 builds on the vision of UDDI, providing a 'meta service' for locating web services by enabling robust queries against rich metadata. Expanding on the foundation of Versions 1 and 2, Version 3 offers the industry a specification for building flexible, interoperable XML Web services registries useful in private as well as public deployments. UDDI V3 has a vast array of enhancements -- including multi-registry topologies, increased security features, improved WSDL support, a new subscription API, and core information model advances. The Version 3 specification offers clients and implementers a comprehensive and complete blueprint of a description and discovery foundation for a diverse set of Web services architectures." [Full context]

  • [June 24, 2002] "UDDI and LDAP: A Perfect Fit?" By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (June 20, 2002). "As rapidly as some Web services protocols, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), have taken hold, others, perhaps most notably Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), have met with less success. Most experts still believe that UDDI will ultimately play a key role in the adoption of Web services. It's best described by its own white pages/yellow pages metaphors. At its core, UDDI provides a place for businesses to describe and register -- and for other companies to discover -- the Web services interfaces they are making available to the world. UDDI has been anything but a slam-dunk thus far. The technology hasn't been as flexible as many developers would like. And participation in public UDDI registries as been low. But it's still early in the game. Many early UDDI server implementations were solely for proof-of-concept. Also, many early servers were public deployments, while much of the early work with Web services turned out not to be over the public Internet but behind corporate firewalls. In the end, UDDI isn't strictly necessary to do SOAP-based Web services. But if such architectures are to scale, developers need a place to register their services so they can be easily found and consumed. Ultimately, criticizing early UDDI specifications and deployment efforts was beside the point -- the technology won't really be needed until Web services take firm hold on the enterprise landscape. Despite its early flaws, UDDI is making progress. The current, 2.0 version of the specification, by most accounts, was a major step forward from the initial standard, adding support for so-called multiple entities that made it much easier for businesses to actually map their organizations and workflows to the repository. Market-watchers expect additional steps forward this summer with the release of version 3.0 of UDDI. Yet even more significantly, vendors are beginning to bring UDDI more into the enterprise mainstream. For instance, the past few weeks have seen growing amounts of activity around mapping UDDI repositories into Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories, which in their own right have emerged as a key enabling e-business technology. Security is already emerging as a key stumbling block for Web services deployments; existing LDAP-based authorization and access schemes can help jump-start those efforts, [Nathan] Owen said... Despite the early hurdles UDDI has faced, developers still believe in the technology, according to a study released this week. According to a poll of developers by Flashline, a provider of software reuse solutions, 55 percent of respondents are currently evaluating internal or external UDDI registries, while 11 percent are already using a UDDI registry to organize access to Web services..."

  • [June 11, 2002] "Sun Readies Dev Tools Suite, UDDI Package." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (June 11, 2002). "Sun Microsystems next week will unveil the Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) Developer Platform, a set of tools and software servers intended to provide IT shops with integration across the life cycle of development. The package will feature Sun's new UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) registry product for setting up registries of Web services available within a firewall or via an extranet. Sun this week also will ship its Sun ONE Studio 4 tool, a component of the tools set and the successor to the Forte for Java package. Sun ONE Studio has been fitted with Web services generation support. Additionally, Sun on June 19 [2002] will detail a new version of its Java-based application server, also part of the developer platform. With the Sun ONE Developer Platform, the company seeks to solve the problem of isolated "silos" of development in an enterprise... Components, each bearing Sun ONE in the name, include: (1) Studio, shipping to online customers this week, is a tool built on the NetBeans open source infrastructure and supporting generation of WSDL (Web Services Description Language)-compliant, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)-compliant, and UDDI-compliant code for Web services. (2) Registry Server, a new product for setting up UDDI registries based on Sun's LDAP implementation. It ships in six to eight weeks. (3) Identity Server, for single sign-on and policy management capabilities. (4) Connector Builder, a new product for building Java adapters enabling Java applications to communicate with back-end systems such as PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle. (5) Application Framework, a new version of the tool designed for graphical, rapid application development. It features a plug-in to the Studio product and ships this summer. (6) Portal Server, for portal development. (7) Integration Server, a previously announced product for integration applications. (8) A new version of Application Server, of which Sun officials would not comment on features. Sun is integrating its application server into the Solaris OS. Sun ONE Studio is available in three configurations, including the free Mobile and Community editions, for mobile application and Java servlet development, respectively, and the full-fledged Enterprise Edition, supporting Enterprise JavaBeans and Web services..."

  • [June 10, 2002] "Novell Joins UDDI Advisory Group." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (June 07, 2002). ['Novell Inc. on Friday became a member of the UDDI Advisory Group as part of the organization's effort to promote Web services standards.'] "As a member of the group, Novell will help to define and promote the UDDI (Universal Discovery, Description and Integration) specifications, which provide the vehicle for organizing and managing Web services. Novell, of Provo, Utah, is interested in the UDDI Advisory Group as part of the company's effort to solidify the role of directories in Web services, the company said Novell has been making moves in this area recently. Last month, Novell submitted a draft specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force outlining an approach for putting UDDI information into an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory. In addition, Novell pushed the DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) Version 2 standard, which was recently adopted and which allows access to a directory through Web services vehicles such as the SOAP (Simple Open Access Protocol) and XML, the company said... Winston Bumpus, director of standards for Novell, said in a statement that the adoption of UDDI 'is essential in order to realize the promise of Web services -- not only to support dynamic transactions among businesses but also to enable seamless integration within the enterprise'..."

  • [June 04, 2002] "UDDI Seeks Its Spot." By Paul Krill and Ed Scannell. In InfoWorld (June 04, 2002). "Is UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) a bust or is it just in an embryonic stage? These questions are being pondered as the Web services directory specification continues to evolve. Adoption rates have not skyrocketed as some expected, prompting many to re-examine where UDDI will fit into the Web services puzzle. The UDDI standard is intended to provide central directories where consumers of Web services can access various services, either within a company's firewall, via an extranet, or on the public Internet. Service providers can register them and make them available via UDDI, which is based on technologies such as XML, HTTP, and DNS. Companies can set up these registries internally and choose to extend access to partners. Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Systinet are among companies that offer, or plan to offer, UDDI products. There are also public UDDI registries deployed by Hewlett-Packard, SAP, and Microsoft... Version 1 of the UDDI specification was announced in September 2000 and Version 2 followed in June 2001. Associates of uddi.org, including Munter, are preparing to release Version 3 in July, focusing on features such as communication between private, semiprivate, and public registries. Security issues also will be addressed. Members of uddi.org also are preparing to turn over jurisdiction of UDDI to a yet-unnamed standards body this summer. A request for proposal document has been published and sent to a selective number of standards development organizations, Munter said... IBM has included support of private UDDI registries in its recently announced WebSphere 5.0 application server. Sun's upcoming UDDI offering will be based on its Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) Directory Server, and will enable setting up of private registries for publishing Web services, company officials said. Novell also planned to update and resubmit in late May a specification entitled 'LDAP schema for UDDI,' originally submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in February. The spec defines a standard format for representing UDDI data types in an LDAPv3 directory. [See "LDAP Schema for UDDI."] Novell is looking to highlight the similiarities between UDDI regisistries and directories as repositories for Web services, as well as the authentication and security features of directories that could supplement UDDI registry security. Systinet has offered a UDDI server called WASP (Web Application and Services Platform) UDDI since October. The product is available free for download and testing. The company has seen the interest level in WASP UDDI fluctuate over time. 'We had very little interest until about January, then we had a remarkable uptake in downloads,' said Anne Thomas Manes, CTO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Systinet. The spike occurred, Manes said, because Web services have begun to reach 'critical mass,' which may bode well for future adoption of UDDI..." Note the comment of Anne Thomas Manes on UDDI and LDAP (UDDI list): "I'd say that one of the biggest differences between UDDI and LDAP is that UDDI allows you to categorize things, while LDAP doesn't. (This point expands on Andrew's comment about the difference between relational information and hierarchical organization.) In UDDI you can categorize any UDDI entity (a business entity, a business service, or a tModel) using any number of taxonomies. A UDDI registry comes with a set of built-in taxonomies (UDDI Type Taxonomy, NAICS, UNSPSC, UDDI Geographic Taxonomy, General Keywords Taxonomy, Owning Business Taxonomy, Relationships Taxonomy, Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S Number identifier, and Thomas Registry Suppliers ID). You can also create your own taxonomies. You use these taxonomies to search UDDI..."

  • [June 04, 2002] "LDAP Schema for UDDI." By Bruce Bergeson and Kent Boogert (Novell, Inc.). Updates the version 00 draft of February 2002. IETF Internet Draft. Reference: 'draft-bergeson-uddi-ldap-schema-01.txt.' Category: Informational. May, 2002, expires November, 2002. "This document defines the schema for representing Universal Description Discovery and Integration (referred to here as UDDI) data types in an LDAP [v3] directory. It defines schema elements to represent a businessEntity, a businessService, a bindingTemplate, a tModel, and a publisherAssertion... The information that makes up a registration in UDDI consists of these five data structure types. This division by information type provides simple partitions to assist in the rapid location and understanding of the different information that makes up a registration. The individual instance data managed by a UDDI registry are sensitive to the parent/child relationships found in the schema. A businessEntity object contains one or more unique businessService objects. Similarly, individual businessService objects contain specific instances of bindingTemplate, which in turn contains information that includes pointers to specific instances of tModel objects. It is important to note that no single instance of a core schema type is ever "contained" by more than one parent instance. This means that only one specific businessEntity object (identified by its unique key value) will ever contain or be used to express information about a specific instance of a businessService object (also identified by its own unique key value)..." [cache]

  • [May 28, 2002] *See preceding entry. "LDAP Schema for UDDI." By Bruce Bergeson and Kent Boogert (Novell, Inc.). IETF Internet Draft. Reference: 'draft-bergeson-uddi-ldap-schema-00.txt'. Category: Informational. February, 2002, 19 pages. "This document defines the schema for representing Universal Description Discovery and Integration (referred to here as UDDI) data types in an LDAP directory [Directory Access Protocol, v3]. It defines schema elements to represent a businessEntity, a businessService, a bindingTemplate, a tModel, and a publisherAssertion... The information that makes up a registration in UDDI consists of these five data structure types. This division by information type provides simple partitions to assist in the rapid location and understanding of the different information that makes up a registration. The individual instance data managed by a UDDI registry are sensitive to the parent/child relationships found in the schema. A businessEntity object contains one or more unique businessService objects. Similarly, individual businessService objects contain specific instances of bindingTemplate, which in turn contains information that includes pointers to specific instances of tModel objects. It is important to note that no single instance of a core schema type is ever 'contained' by more than one parent instance. This means that only one specific businessEntity object (identified by its unique key value) will ever contain or be used to express information about a specific instance of a businessService object (also identified by its own unique key value)..." [cache]

  • [May 03, 2002] "The Promise of UDDI." By Tamara Carter. In Software Development Magazine (April 2002). ['If you build Web services, will the users come?'] "'When should you get involved with Web services?' Mark Colan, an e-business evangelist for IBM, asked the audience at his class "All About UDDI" on Wednesday morning at SD West's Web Services World. 'Now,' he answered, 'so you'll be in a good position when it really gets off the ground.' While the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) specification, part of which emulates a yellow pages directory, certainly offers the promise of greater profit and interactivity by bringing companies and available Web services together, the sparse audience at Colan's talk didn't offer much proof that the public is jumping on the UDDI bandwagon. Colan acknowledged that the public UDDI registry is 'very hit or miss.' As it exists today, the registry may be filled with experiments, bogus information or spam, in addition to useful services. Despite his evangelical role, Colan doesn't think the registry will truly become useful until 2004, the year he believes "we'll really get serious" about Web services. Until that magic date, private UDDI may provide companies with a way to usefully use Web services. According to Colan, you could use UDDI behind your firewall, for example, enabling employees to search within the company for internal or approved service providers and automate transactions beyond current intranet approaches..."

  • [May 03, 2002] "Sun Readies UDDI Offering." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (May 02, 2002). "Sun Microsystems is preparing within a few months to launch a server-based product for setting up UDDI registries for publishing Web services, according to Sun officials. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) is an industry standard for development of Web services registries, to be deployed either privately within company firewalls or publicly... 'The purpose of the product would be, I would assume, to support the use of registries within a private company, within a company's firewall, or within a set of trusted partners,' said Suzy Struble, manager of XML Web services for Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun. The product, however, is 'certainly something that could [also] be deployed in a public manner,' added Struble, who is a Sun delegate to uddi.org, which is steering development of the UDDI standard. The UDDI effort will be part of the Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) software initiative and will be important to an upcoming revision of a Sun ONE-based product, according to a Sun representative. Sun recently re-branded several software product lines under the Sun ONE umbrella, including its iPlanet offerings, which feature software such as Web and portal servers. Sun with its UDDI and Web services efforts may be getting a bit ahead of the market, according to one analyst... Sun has no plans to set up a UDDI node for registering publicly available Web services, as some other vendors have done, according to Struble..."

  • [April 29, 2002] "UDDI Endures Reality Check Debate." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (April 26, 2002). "Although UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) has not yet fulfilled its promise to become the public registration technology for Web services, the concept is gaining a steady foothold, a panel of uddi.org members said during a session here at the Software Development Conference and Expo on Thursday. UDDI is designed to provide registries, either public or private, for registering and discovering Web services. Panelists from uddi.org, which is shepherding the technology, were sounded out about the progress of UDDI. The concept is still maturing, said panelist Joel Munter, senior software engineer at Intel, following comments from panel moderator Brent Sleeper, a consultant at Stencil Group, about registries allegedly 'missing in action' and scant services being available. 'There's a reluctance to populate a public registry with Web services,' Munter said. 'I don't think [the lack of services registered] says [UDDI] is not successful,' said panelist Suzy Struble, manager of XML industry initiatives at Sun Microsystems. Many Sun customers still are thinking about using UDDI internally first before considering utilizing public registries, she said. UDDI is well-positioned for use within firewalls, she said. Panelist Claus Von Riegen, XML standards architect at SAP, which has deployed a UDDI business registry, agreed with the notion that public registry development is not the only measurement of success of UDDI. UDDI, he added, can be used for business-to-business integration, enterprise application creation, and for developing a network of business partners..."

  • [April 24, 2002] "UDDI 2.0 Provides Ties That Bind." By Timothy Dyck. In (April 22, 2002). "With one version's worth of experience under its belt, the UDDI design team has gained valuable insight into the things it missed in UDDI 1.0. UDDI 2.0 takes important steps forward, while 3.0 [...] should really hit its stride... The UDDI 2.0 specification, which was released last June, makes two major changes over UDDI 1.0. First, Version 2.0 provides a way for multiple entities (multiple UDDI BusinessEntity objects) in a UDDI directory to link themselves in a hierarchy or in a horizontal, point-to-point chain. This is especially important for large organizations with many divisions or subsidiaries that will register themselves in a UDDI directory... Second, UDDI 2.0 adds a mechanism for those querying a UDDI directory to verify that the statements an organization makes about itself are true. Claims about categorization (the type of industry a business is in, using standardized industry taxonomies) or identity (any unique identifiers, such as a Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S number) can now be defined as checked taxonomies. UDDI 2.0 directories pass information in checked taxonomies through a verification process (left unspecified by the standard) before allowing the entries to be registered. Four organizations -- Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Microsoft Corp. and SAP AG -- are hosting beta implementations of public UDDI directories based on UDDI 2.0. As the uddi.org site warns, these registries are for testing and prototyping UDDI 2.0 only, and data stored in them may be lost at any time. IBM and Microsoft continue to maintain production-status UDDI 1.0 registries..."

  • [March 18, 2002] "Aggregate UDDI Searches with Business Explorer for Web Services. Developers can radically simplify their Web services searches with BE4WS." By Liang-Jie Zhang (Researcher, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center) and Qun Zhou (Software Engineer, IBM Software Group). From IBM developerWorks, Web services. March 2002. ['Many developers believe that Web services will open up a world of interlocking business services that find each other over the Internet, thus integrating disparate code into useful programs. But if this vision is to come to pass, users must be able to find services out there on the vast public network. Current searching APIs are rudimentary at best, and a developer must write a lot of code in order to find the Web services he or she desires. Business Explorer for Web Services (BE4WS) is an alphaWorks technology, based on the Java programming language and XML, that aims to simplify Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) searches for developers and users alike. Liang-Jie Zhang and Qun Zhou walk you through some example code to show you how it's done -- and show you how you can a build a Web-based application that will allow users to find Web services without writing any code at all.'] "Web services are typically published to a public or private UDDI registry. The design of UDDI allows simple forms of searching and allows trading partners to publish data about themselves and their advertised Web services to voluntarily provide categorization data. In general, UDDI can locate businesses whose identities are well known; and users can find out what services those businesses offer and how to interface with them electronically. The current UDDI search mechanism can only focus on a single search criterion, such as business name, business location, business category, or service type by name, business identifier, or discovery URL. From an e-business application developer's point of view, it would be ideal to send a few sequential or programmed search commands to the UDDI registry for information aggregation. Potential information sources could include multiple UDDI registries and other searchable sources. Obviously, there is a need to dramatically extend the current search capability for Web services to improve efficiency and performance. All existing UDDI search engines only support a single UDDI registry. For example, Microsoft's UDDI search technology only allows users to search its UDDI registry, and those searches can only use a single search query, based on one of the following categories: business name, business location, business category, and service type by name, business identifier, or discovery URL. The known taxonomy types include NAICS, UNSPSC, SIC, or a geographic code (GEO); the known identifier types include D-U-N-S, Thomas Registry numbers, and US Tax ID. In this article, we will introduce a newly released technology, BE4WS, an XML-based UDDI-exploring engine that provides developers with standard interfaces for efficiently searching business and service information in individual or multiple UDDI registries. BE4WS is written in Java programming language; it uses information in UDDI Search Markup Language (USML) documents to direct UDDI clients like UDDI4J to conduct complex UDDI searches. You can build BE4WS into your Java programs, or invoke it from a servlet and create a BE4WS Web application or Web service..."

  • [January 15, 2002] "NTT Communications to Become Asia's First UDDI Business Registry Node Operator." - "NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) announced today that it has received approval to become Asia's first business registry node operator under the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project. UDDI is a worldwide industry initiative to enable businesses to quickly, easily, and dynamically find one another, leading potentially to new business-to-business e-commerce. UDDI enables a business to describe its business and its services on the Internet, discover other businesses that offer desired services, and integrate with these businesses. The project was launched in the U.S. in September 2000 and now counts over 300 corporations as members, including NTT Com, one of the original members. The UDDI Business Registry is a global, platform-independent, open-architecture database for companies to register their business and the services they offer. Individuals and companies use the registry to find a business or service based on information provided by the registered business, covering categories such as business entity, business service and specifications, transaction methods, and other technical information about the service... A node operator is a company that provides access to the UDDI Business Registry. Operators regularly update their nodes to include registrations made via other operators, resulting in a complete set of registrations available to all users. Other node operators include Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett Packard and SAP. Consistency among these operators is assured by the UDDI Operator's Council, which sets overall policy and quality-of-service guidelines...NTT Com, as Asia's first node operator, will launch a UDDI Business Registry using cross-industry platforms and systems based on the latest Internet technology, including Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL)." [source]

  • [December 21, 2001] "HP, IBM and SAP Ease Web Services Publication with UDDI and Java. Industry Leaders Promote Web Services Adoption with UDDI Technology Upgrade for Java Developers." - "Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, and SAP AG today announced that they have committed to support UDDI4J, an open-source Java class library that supplies an application-programming interface (API) for interacting with Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries. UDDI4J benefits Java developers by providing them a common API for programmatically registering services as well as for querying and accessing information in UDDI-based registries. Agreement on UDDI4J also benefits the Web services industry as a whole by reducing hurdles associated with creating Web services tools. IBM originally made UDDI4J available as open source in January 2001. HP played an active role with IBM in UDDI4J by enhancing the original UDDI4J API to meet the new UDDI V2 specifications. SAP has contributed its experience and resources in deploying business-driven APIs to ensure rapid adoption of UDDI4J in the business community. [1] 'As an advocate of both the UDDI and the open source movement, supporting UDDI4J makes sense for HP,' said Jack Walicki, chief technology officer, HP Middleware Division. [2] 'UDDI4J is an excellent example of how the open source process can be used to create high-quality Java libraries to simplify application development around industry standards,' said Bob Sutor, director of e-business standards strategy, IBM. [3] 'Web services and UDDI provide essential building blocks to facilitate business on a global level through the Web. Easy development, publication and deployment driven out of heterogeneous environments are crucial for the success of Web services,' said Willi Therre, senior vice president application integration, SAP AG. This announcement follows UDDI.org's Nov. 19 announcement that HP, IBM, Microsoft and SAP launched beta versions of public UDDI Business Registries that allow businesses to easily search, discover, and integrate Web services. The UDDI Business Registry provides a standards-based protocol for cataloging services at design time and for discovering services at run time. Additional information regarding UDDI4J can be found at the UDDI4J Web site, http://www.uddi4j.org..."

  • [December 04, 2001]   IBM's Business Explorer for Web Services Supports UDDI Search Markup Language (USML).    IBM alphaWorks has released a new XML-based UDDI exploring engine that "provides developers with standard interfaces for efficiently searching business and service information in single or multiple UDDI registries. Business Explorer for Web Services (BE4WS) is based on a proposed UDDI Search Markup Language (USML) for carrying a search request including multiple queries, key words, UDDI sources, and aggregation operators. The Advanced UDDI Search Engine (AUSE) ia a core component of BE4WS which processes the USML request and performs advanced exploring. The AUSE engine aggregates search results from different UDDI registries based on the USML request and its supporting intelligent search facilities. Examples of these facilities are Instant Notification Broker, UDDI Source Dispatching Broker, and Information Aggregation Broker, all of which have both prior knowledge of the meanings of specific categories and the ability to cross-reference across multiple categories. The XML-based USML response that may include business entities, services, service types (t-Models) from UDDI registries, and other extra information (such as relationships among services) from non-UDDI sources or Enhanced UDDI sources. The response provides additional aggregation and selection functions on top of what UDDI provides. The architecture of BE4WS is extensible, so it will be easy to include queries to future enhancements of UDDI registries." [Full context]

  • [December 14, 2001] "Using UDDI at Run Time." By Karsten Januszewski (Microsoft Corporation). December 2001. ['This article walks through using UDDI at run time and discusses how UDDI, both the public registry and UDDI Services available in Microsoft Windows .NET Server, can act as infrastructure for Web services to support client applications.'] "UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) is often called the 'yellow pages' for Web Services. While the yellow pages analogy is useful, it doesn't convey the complete story of how UDDI can be incorporated into a Web service-based software architecture. The yellow pages analogy only speaks to design-time usage of UDDI -- the ability to discover and consume Web services by searches based on keywords, categories or interfaces. From a design-time perspective, the yellow pages analogy is accurate: just as the yellow pages categorizes and catalogs businesses and their phone numbers, UDDI categorizes and catalogs providers and their Web services. A developer can find WSDL files and access points in UDDI and then incorporate those Web services into client applications. However, UDDI offers more than just design-time support. The yellow pages analogy does not speak to how UDDI offer run-time support. UDDI plays a critical role after the discovery process is complete. The ability to programmatically query UDDI at run time allows UDDI to act as an infrastructure to build reliable, robust Web service applications... UDDI provides important run-time functionality that can be integrated into applications so as to create more robust, dynamic clients. By using UDDI as infrastructure in a Web services architecture, applications can be written to be more reliable..."

  • [December 11, 2001] "SilverStream Software Releases the SilverStream eXtend JEDDI Registry as a Resource for Developers. Available for Free Download to Foster the Adoption of UDDI Registries to Publish, Discover and Manage Web Services." - "SilverStream Software, Inc. today announced that SilverStream eXtend JEDDI, a comprehensive UDDI (Universal Discovery, Description and Integration) implementation, is available for free download at http://software.silverstream.com. SilverStream has released a free developer edition of SilverStream eXtend JEDDI (Java Enterprise Discovery, Description and Integration) to encourage developers to discover the benefits of UDDI for publishing, managing and sharing Web Services internally across development projects. SilverStream Software is a member of the UDDI community and supports the continued development of the UDDI standard... SilverStream eXtend JEDDI, currently available in beta, is an open implementation of the UDDI v1.0 specification and can be used for public Web Services development and testing as well as private UDDI deployments. It includes administration tools, core data, and optional test data to help developers get started quickly with UDDI. SilverStream eXtend JEDDI comes with sample business data for testing (UDDI clients), and features a Web-based administration tool that offers: (1) User group administration to determine limits for how many businesses, services, bindings and tModels (service type definition) can be published per user; (2) The ability to trace incoming and outgoing messages; (3) An error log and the ability to track performance. Like all of SilverStream's products, SilverStream eXtend JEDDI is fully standards-based so that it can be flexibly leveraged on a variety of platforms. Its server agent executes in J2EE application servers including the SilverStream eXtend Application Server (3.7.4 and higher) and Apache Tomcat (3.7 and 4.0), and can be precompiled and repackaged using the SilverStream eXtend Workbench to support BEA WebLogic, IBM WebShpere, Oracle 9iAS and others. In addition, SilverStream eXtend JEDDI supports a variety of databases including Oracle 8i, IBM DB2 v.7, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Informix Cloudscape 3.6 and Sybase Adaptive Server v.6. SilverStream eXtend JEDDI is a core component of the SilverStream eXtend integrated services environment, the first comprehensive, J2EE-compatible product suite to simplify and accelerate the development and deployment of services-oriented applications on market-leading J2EE application servers. In addition to a UDDI v1.0 implementation, SilverStream eXtend features comprehensive support for all other Web Services standards including a SOAP v1.1 implementation provided by SilverStream's jBroker. Web, a WSDL Editor that simplifies the creation of Web Service descriptions from scratch as part of the SilverStream eXtend Workbench, and the ability to create XML Web Services from any enterprise system using SilverStream eXtend Composer..."

  • [November 02, 2001]   IBM and Microsoft Issue Specification and Software for Web Services Inspection Language.    IBM and Microsoft have jointly issued an announcement for a Web Services Inspection specification (WS-Inspection). The WS-Inspection specification "defines how an application can discover an XML Web service description on a Web server, enabling developers to easily browse Web servers for XML Web services. WS-Inspection complements the IBM- and Microsoft-pioneered 'Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)' global directory technology by facilitating the discovery of available services on Web sites unlisted in the UDDI registries, and builds on Microsoft's SOAP Discovery technology built into Visual Studio .NET. IBM and Microsoft expect to submit WS-Inspection to an appropriate standards body. WS-Inspection provides (1) a standard way to locate and retrieve Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents and other service descriptions by browsing a single Web server; (2) the capability for XML Web service providers to group sets of related service descriptions, enabling interested parties to determine which descriptions are related to particular services; (3) a way to correlate XML Web services with other types of content, such as HTML pages. For example, a browser may download an HTML page that has corresponding XML Web services of which both the user and the browser environment need to be made aware." [Full context]

  • [November 30, 2001] "UDDI Promises Link To Web Services. Upcoming version in early 2002 will include security, way to link registries; may jump-start vendor-led standard." By Tim Wilson. In InternetWeek (November 26, 2001). "UDDI, which was developed by Ariba, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and SAP, is a set of specifications designed to help companies publish information about themselves, their Web services and the interfaces required to link with those services. Essentially, UDDI is a combination of three elements. An electronic 'white pages' lists basic contact information for parties involved. A 'yellow pages' offers details about companies and descriptions of the electronic capabilities they offer to their trading partners. And a data dictionary, or 'green pages,' lists the standards and software interfaces that partners must comply with to execute those electronic functions using XML as a common language... So far, UDDI is very much in its pilot phase. IBM and Microsoft have established working UDDI Business Registry nodes. And Hewlett-Packard and SAP are scheduled to launch nodes by the end of this year. A few smaller service providers, including Cape Clear and TransactTools, have rolled out UDDI offerings, but most user companies haven't done much more than provide their names and addresses. About 5,000 companies have added their contact information to the white pages portion of the UDDI Business Registry, said Tom Glover, program manager for the UDDI.org consortium. A reasonable percentage have added yellow pages data about what they do and the Web services they plan to offer, Glover said. UDDI's green pages have yet to be populated... Today, most businesses use the Internet to communicate on a bilateral, ad hoc basis. For example, if Company A wants to send a purchase order via the Web to Company B, an IT person from Company A must call Company B on the phone, find out if it accepts Web-based purchase orders, and collect information on acceptable purchase order formats and interfaces for linking to Company B's order-entry application. Multiply this process by 100 different documents--invoices, shipping confirmations, requests for information--and 1,000 different suppliers, and it becomes a time-consuming and resource-intensive effort. With UDDI, companies would enter those capabilities in a registry, essentially a listing of all the electronic functions that a company offers to its partners. Public registries, such as those currently offered by IBM and Microsoft, are likely to be accessible by any company doing business on the Internet. Most companies, however, will build private registries that can only be accessed by approved trading partners, analysts say. Using the XML descriptions stored in the registry, companies will find out if a particular supplier supports specific types of Web interfaces, such as RosettaNet or Microsoft BizTalk. Once a company has found the interface for linking to the supplier, its IT staff can use the registry to pull up the exact technical steps required to link to that supplier. Then the two companies can use the emerging Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to exchange data via the Internet, even if their back-end systems are made by different vendors. The UDDI specification itself is a set of rules for describing electronic capabilities via XML and a method of registering and discovering those descriptions via the Web. The second version of the UDDI specification also describes a way for linking registries, so that if a company puts information about itself in one registry, the data can be shared by other registries as well. All companies must enter their own information in the registry, but many companies will rely on a third party -- such as a public e-marketplace or industry Web portal -- to search out potential partners and the means of accessing their services, experts said..."

  • [November 21, 2001]   UDDI Version 2 Technical Specification Now Supported by Four Public Implementations.    Hewlett Packard Company, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP have now deployed public version 2 beta implementations of the UDDI Business Registry conforming to the latest UDDI technical specification. The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Version 2 specification "expands UDDI functionality to enhance support for deploying public and private Web service registries. In addition to taking advantage of the public UDDI Business Registry sites, enterprises can also deploy private registries to manage internal Web services using the UDDI specification. Access to internal Web service information may also be extended to a private network of business partners. Improvements to the UDDI programmer interfaces enable developers to use complex queries in accessing data in UDDI registries; new query options include wildcard support and enhanced search across multiple categories. Version 2 supports business relationship modeling, e.g., modeling of large businesses, organizational structure, or various business units and services within UDDI. With the addition of HP and SAP as hosts of the UDDI Business Registry, there are now four browser-accessible points to find and manage UDDI information. First released in June 2001, the UDDI version 2 technical specification is based upon input from many of the 300+ companies now participating in the project." [Full context]

  • [October 04, 2001] "SAP Fully Embraces UDDI. SAP Becomes UDDI Business Registry Operator." - "SAP AG, the world's leading provider of e-business software solutions, today announced it has become a global UDDI Operator and will build on UDDI for service integration and publish global services within the UDDI Business Registry. With this threefold strategy, SAP will fully leverage UDDI for e-business solutions -- from providing SAP functionality for Web services to using services published through UDDI. This strategy will provide SAP customers with an easy path to participate in and drive collaborative business. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Business Registry is a global, public, online directory that gives businesses a uniform way to describe their services, discover other companies' services, and understand the methods necessary to conduct e-business with a particular company. As a key element of the framework that makes Web services a reality, the UDDI Business Registry is an implementation based on the UDDI Specifications, which are available at http://www.uddi.org/... As part of becoming a UDDI Business Registry Operator, SAP will build, run and maintain a global UDDI node, enabling businesses to register and discover Web services via the Internet. SAP has been a driving member of the UDDI initiative, which enables businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically collaborate, since its inception... SAP will make it possible to provide the application functions of the mySAP.com e-business platform as a service, which makes it easy for customers to provide this information externally through UDDI. In addition, SAP customers can use UDDI to quickly and easily find and integrate complementary services regardless of their location. For example, a service such as "check product availability" can be performed without putting the integration challenge on the IT manager. Removing the technical implementation details of a service and allowing the customer to focus on the business meaning eases interoperability. SAP customers can register their business through the SAP Service Marketplace. At the customer's request, the stored business information can be published in the UDDI Business Registry, made available globally and enhanced by individual services. SAP has already registered itself and started to publish its global services offerings, such as the 'test drive' of the mySAP.com e-business platform, in UDDI..."

  • [October 23, 2001]   Microsoft Releases New XML Web Services Specifications for a Global XML Web Services Architecture.    Microsoft Corporation has published a new architectural model for the next generation of XML Web services together with four specifications supporting that architecture. This Global XML Web Services Architecture "provides a set of principles and guidelines for advancing the protocols and file formats of today's XML Web services to more complex and sophisticated tasks. The four specifications build on XML Web services technologies such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI specifications, extending them for global-class computing. The new specifications adhere to the road map outlined by Microsoft and IBM Corp. at the W3C Web Services Workshop in April 2001 and represent a first step toward a comprehensive Global XML Web Services Architecture. (1) WS-Security outlines how to use the W3C specifications XML Signature and XML Encryption; (2) WS-License, along with WS-Security, outlines how existing digital credentials and their associated trust semantics can be securely associated with SOAP messages; (3) WS-Routing describes how to place message addresses in the SOAP message header and enables SOAP messages to travel serially to multiple destinations along a message path [formerly SOAP-RP]; (4) WS-Referral enables the routing between SOAP nodes on a message path to be dynamically configured. As with previous XML Web services specifications, these four will be available for a review period and then submitted to appropriate standards bodies." [Full context]

  • [November 09, 2001] "Service Registry Proxy: A higher-level API." By Alfredo da Silva (Advisory Software Engineer, IBM). From IBM developerWorks. November 2001. ['In order to provide additional tools to the Web services developer, this article discusses a new API -- the Service Registry Proxy, or SRP -- which helps to raise the abstraction level during application development and promotes seamless integration between UDDI and WSDL elements.'] "The release of the UDDI4J API enabled the creation of UDDI-aware applications, making the publish, unpublish and find operations available from an open-source API. In order to allow WSDL documents to be part of this equation, a new layer called the Service Registry Proxy API (or SRP), which sits on top of the UDDI4J, has been devised. The SRP API elements encapsulate classes present in the UDDI4J API, and some defined by the WSDL4J API, and offer a comprehensive set of methods for interfacing with a UDDI Registry. Its model simplifies the development of applications because it raises the level of abstraction, enabling the developer to concentrate on entities directly related to the Web services architecture domain. SRP supporting classes The SRP API is structured around the following main elements: Service Provider (SP), Service Definition (SD), Service Implementation (SIMP), and Service Interface (SITF)... SP (The Service Provider) represents an entity capable of providing services. It encapsulates a reference to the UDDI4J class BusinessEntity. SD (The Service Definition) describes a service by breaking it down into two pieces: implementation (SIMP) and a list of the implemented interfaces (SITF). SIMP (The Service Implementation) has a dual role. It exposes the related WSDL implementation document (see Resources) and also has a reference to the UDDI4J class BusinessService. SINT (The Service Interface) also encapsulates two entities: a WSDL interface document and a reference to the UDDI4J class TModel. The WSDL capabilities presented by SIMP and SINT are inherited from their parent class WSDLServiceInfo. This organization enables SRP to tie together UDDI and WSDL elements and, at the same time, abstract their concepts -- thereby making the creation of Web services a more productive task." Article also in PDF format.

  • [July 23, 2001]   IBM alphaWorks Offers IBM UDDI Registry.    A UDDI registry has been made available from IBM's alphaWorks web site. The IBM UDDI Registry is "a UDDI-compliant registry for Web services in a private intranet environment. The IBM UDDI Registry supports multiple users in various department- or company-wide scenarios. It also supports the 20 SOAP-based APIs defined by version one of the UDDI specifications, and it provides persistence for published entities through a relational database. Also provided is a Web-based graphical user interface that supports publishing and querying of businesses, services, and other UDDI-compliant entities without programming... The IBM UDDI Registry supports the UDDI Version 1 specifications for schema and API. This includes support for XML and SOAP. Additional technologies are offered as part of the implementation, such as UDDI4J, which is IBM's library for accessing a UDDI-compliant registry from Java. Developers can publish and manage their Web services described using WSDL with the IBM UDDI Registry." [Full context]

  • [August 2001] "ebXML Registry/Repository Implementation. Introducing the First J2EE-Based ebXML Registry/Repository Implementation." By Scott Fordin (XML Technology Center, Sun Microsystems). August, 2001. See the section "ebXML and UDDI; Complementary, Not Competitive": "Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) addresses basic Web service registration and metadata discovery. UDDI is strong as a public metadata registry and discovery service component for information you want to make publicly available to other business entities and customers. While UDDI is useful for registering Web services and discovering metadata, it was not designed to act as a service repository. ebXML is complementary to UDDI, expanding the capabilities of UDDI by providing a richer security model and a more comprehensive registry service application programming interface (API) that can access e-business resources. UDDI is simply used to register and discover the metadata associated with services that can be classified into a small number of fixed categories. UDDI thus serves as an electronic "phonebook" for advertising business partners, services and their corresponding service interfaces. UDDI does not support a repository that can store XML resources, such as service description documents and business process definitions, required to form executable trading agreements, nor does UDDI presently specify a security model. To fill this gap, an ebXML Registry/Repository can store actual data -- including XML documents defined in other ebXML specifications such as protocol profiles and business process schemas -- in a more sophisticated and extensible classification scheme than offered by UDDI. The ebXML Registries/Repositories specification also defines a role-based authentication security model to enable access based on user identity. What this means is that ebXML registries are the ideal place to store e-business information intended for private networks. UDDI and ebXML Registries/Repositories can be used collaboratively. For example, a metadata field in a UDDI registry can serve as a locator -- say a URL -- of the associated data stored in an ebXML registry/repository, thereby allowing a UDDI registry to "point to" an ebXML registry/repository. With this in mind, a likely infrastructure model is to use public UDDI registries for basic service advertising, and private ebXML registry/repositories for storage of actual XML resources..."

  • [July 09, 2001] "Zvon UDDI Reference." By Miloslav Nic. July 2001. "We have just published the Zvon UDDI Reference based on the final version of XML Schema standard. The normative XML Schemas uddi_v2.xsd, uddi_v2replication.xsd, uddi_v2custody.xsd, and uddi_1.xsd are available at http://uddi.org/specification.html. The reference contains a comparison of versions 1 and 2, and both versions contain both abbreviated and expanded schema for the selected element as well as the context it can appear in. See also the Zvon SOAP Reference and WSDL Reference. [Posting from Miloslav Nic]

  • UDDI Day at XML DevCon 2001 - New York City, April 10, 2001

  • [February 2001] "Modeling the UDDI Schema with UML." By Dave Carlson (CTO, Ontogenics Corp., Boulder, Colorado). From XMLmodeling.com. February 2001. "The OMG has also adopted a standard interchange format for serializing models and exchanging them between UML tools, called the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) specification. XMI is actually broader in scope than this, but its use with UML is most prevalent. Many UML modeling tools now support import/export using the XMI format, so it's now possible to get an XML document that contains a complete UML model definition. This capability is the foundation for the remainder of this white paper. Using an XMI file exported from any UML tool, I have written an XSLT transformation that generates an XML Schema document from the UML class model definition. As an example that demonstrates the benefits of modeling XML vocabularies with UML, I have reverse engineered a substantial part of the UDDI specification. The current UDDI specification (as of January 2001) includes an XML Schema definition that is based on an old version of the XML Schema draft, well before the out-dated April 7th 2000 draft. In contrast, the UDDI schemas described here are compliant with the XML Schema Candidate Recommendation, dated October 24, 2000. The reverse engineering was accomplished manually, by reading the UDDI specification and creating a UML model in Rational Rose..."

  • [September 20, 2001] "Understanding WSDL in a UDDI Registry. How to Publish and Find WSDL Service Descriptions." By Peter Brittenham, Francisco Cubera, Dave Ehnebuske, and Steve Graham. From IBM developerWorks [Web services articles]. September 2001. ['The Web Services Description Language has a lot of versatility in its methods of use. In particular, WSDL can work with UDDI registries in several different ways depending upon the application needs. In this first of a three-part series, we will look at these different methods of using WSDL with UDDI registries.'] The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an XML language for describing Web services as a set of network endpoints that operate on messages. A WSDL service description contains an abstract definition for a set of operations and messages, a concrete protocol binding for these operations and messages, and a network endpoint specification for the binding. Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) provides a method for publishing and finding service descriptions. The UDDI data entities provide support for defining both business and service information. The service description information defined in WSDL is complementary to the information found in a UDDI registry. UDDI provides support for many different types of service descriptions. As a result, UDDI has no direct support for WSDL or any other service description mechanism. The UDDI organization, UDDI.org, has published a best practices document titled Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry 1.05. This best practices document describes some of the elements on how to publish WSDL service descriptions in a UDDI registry. The purpose of this article is to augment that information. The primary focus is on how to map a complete WSDL service description into a UDDI registry, which is required by existing WSDL tools and runtime environments. The information in this article adheres to the procedures outlined in that best practices document and is consistent with the specifications for WSDL 1.1, UDDI 1.0 and UDDI 2.0..." For related articles, see the IBM developerWorks Web Services Zone. References: "Web Services Description Language (WSDL)."

  • [September 12, 2001] "Digital Evolution draws up internal UDDI registries." By Charles Babcock [Interactive Week]. From ZDNet TechInfo. September 10, 2001. "Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registries are expected to provide a path to services over the Web. But Eric Pulier, president of Digital Evolution, believes UDDI is also good for providing services within the enterprise. The UDDI registry is something like the pages of the phone book. The UDDI Community, an industry consortium of 280 technology vendors and businesses, will eventually submit a mature specification to a standards body, such as the World Wide Web Consortium or the Internet Engineering Task Force... Digital Evolution is a company that provides a UDDI registry inside a company's firewall for employees and anointed business partners to access and use. The UDDI registry is something like the pages of the phone book. The XML-based specification provides support for contact names and Web addresses (white pages), an industry classification (yellow pages) and types of services offered (green pages). At some point, a series of UDDI servers are expected to exist around the Web like the current Domain Name System, which translates typed Web site names into TCP/IP addresses. By querying those servers, a Web application or other software could discover what services are available to it, what transactions they offer and what level of encryption is used... Digital Evolution is one of the first companies to seize the emerging UDDI standard and build a product line around it, though it is aimed inside the corporation at the IT manager rather than outside at software to software Web operations. 'We have a private UDDI registry. We seek to sell a suite of products that facilitate the use of Web services in an enterprise,' Pulier said. The products include: Data Consumer, a browser-based data sorter that allows narrowing a data set to what the user is interested in; Margin Call, which allows a server to be set up to store frequently requested data in main memory, leading to speedier responses; Code Mason, which automatically creates copies of stored procedures and data access classes of a database system, reducing the need for programmers to recreate them manually; and Java Trap, which creates a repository of XML files containing information about the environment in which a Java application will run..."

  • [July 12, 2001] "Using WSDL in a UDDI Registry." From UDDI.org. UDDI Working Draft Best Practices Document. Version 1.05. June 25, 2001. By Francisco Curbera (IBM), David Ehnebuske (IBM), and Dan Rogers (Microsoft). "The Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification provides a platform-independent way of describing services, discovering businesses, and integrating business services using the Internet. The UDDI data structures provide a framework for the description of basic business and service information, and architects an extensible mechanism to provide detailed service access information using any standard description language. Many such languages exist in specific industry domains and at different levels of the protocol stack. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is a general purpose XML language for describing the interface, protocol bindings and the deployment details of network services. WSDL complements the UDDI standard by providing a uniform way of describing the abstract interface and protocol bindings of arbitrary network services. The purpose of this document is to clarify the relationship between the two, describe how WSDL can be used to help create UDDI business service descriptions... As an aid to understanding the sections ahead, we provide here a brief overview of two UDDI data structures that are particularly relevant to the use of WSDL in the context of a UDDI registry: the tModel, also known as the service type definition, and the businessService. tModels provide the ability to describe compliance with a specification, a concept, or a shared design. tModels have various uses in the UDDI registry. We are interested here in the use of tModels to represent technical specifications like wire protocols, interchange formats and sequencing rules. When a particular specification is registered with the UDDI repository as a tModel, it is assigned a unique key, which is then used in the description of service instances to indicate compliance with the specification..." [cache]

  • [June 18, 2001] "Tech Giants Update E-Commerce Standard." By Stephen Shankland. From CNET News.com. June 18, 2001. "A gaggle of computing giants will release Monday a new version of a key Web standard that provides some common ground on how competitors such as Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems view the future of the Internet. In September, Microsoft, IBM and Ariba proposed a standard called Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). The standard allows businesses to register with an Internet directory that will help companies advertise their services, so they can find one another and conduct transactions over the Web. The online yellow pages directory that UDDI provides is a key part of how 'Web services' plans such as Microsoft .Net and Sun One will work together despite corporate differences. Since last year, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and others have joined the UDDI initiative, and the first working version of the UDDI directory was launched in May. But on Monday, the companies plan to announce the second version of the standard. The new version comes with several improvements. Among them is better support for different languages; more sophisticated searching features; the ability to describe company organizational structures such as divisions, groups and subsidiaries; and more specific business categories that companies can use to describe themselves... Registry services on the Internet are essential for Web services to succeed, and so far UDDI looks like the only option, said Gartner Group analyst Daryl Plummer. Plummber believes UDDI initially will be used in private arrangements among business partners -- for example, Home Depot could use a UDDI-based service that finds light-switch suppliers and ranks them according to pricing and availability of light switches. But UDDI faces a thorny issue: whether it will become an industry standard. Such a move would reduce the control the founding members have but could make UDDI more palatable to others by making it more neutral. UDDI organizers have said they plan to turn it over to a standards body, but that likely won't happen in the immediate future, Plummer said." See the 2001-06-18 announcement.

  • [June 7, 2001] "On Using WSDL in UDDI Registry." By Radovan Janecek and Martin Dvorak (Idoox). June 7, 2001. "This paper contributes to the discussion on using WSDL as a business service description in the UDDI Registry. It presents an analysis of possible techniques and evaluates their advantages and drawbacks from a technical point-of-view. The purpose of this paper is to introduce Idoox's proposal for public review... We can expect that the simple, relatively straightforward nature of WSDL and UDDI will eventually become more complex as various work- ow eorts really get underway. Specifications like WSFL, XLANG, SOAP-RP are adding some level of complexity to this issue already. Therefore, we are actively soliciting feedback on this topic, and have already begun discussions with other companies. Our objective is to move this issue towards a UDDI V3."

  • [June 19, 2001]   Antarcti.ca Systems Announces Visual Mapping Software for UDDI.    An announcement from Antarcti.ca Systems Inc. (ASI) describes the development of 'Visual Net' visualization technology which uses mapping software to "act as a front end to the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Registry. The UDDI Business Registry is a global, public, online directory that gives businesses a uniform way to describe their services, discover other companies' services, and understand the methods necessary to conduct e-business with a particular company. Visual Net places the UDDI Business Registry data on large-scale maps utilizing a superior navigation system and information-rich visuals to enable users to find information on businesses." The UDDI Registry Map under development will feature (1) "A visual map displaying categories of information enabling users to browse through all the data and drill down into those areas of interest; (2) The ability to search the database using classification taxonomies such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code from the same interface; (3) An intuitive display that instantly and visually shows the user valuable information about data in the Registry such as how wide-ranging the services of a business are and provides a relevancy scale of the data for the user." [Full context]

  • [June 19, 2001] "UDDI Business Directory Widens Reach." By Joris Evers. In InfoWorld June 18, 2001. "UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), the foundation of an online directory to facilitate business-to-business electronic commerce, opened up to more international and complex businesses on Monday with the announcement of Version 2 of the UDDI specification. UDDI, Version 2 supports description of complex corporate organizational structures, allows additional categorization of business activities, and supports multiple languages. UDDI V2 also has improved search functionality, according to a UDDI Project statement. UDDI, a brainchild of IBM, Microsoft, and Ariba, aims to smooth electronic business by making it easier for businesses to provide information about their products and services on the Web as well as locate partners and customers... The UDDI Community is gathering this week in Atlanta to discuss the requirements of Version 3.

  • [June 15, 2001] "Inside UDDI." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (June 07, 2001). "Later this month, UDDI.org will unveil version 2.0 of its specification for helping companies find each other via the Internet. With the backing of more than 280 companies, the Universal Description, Discover and Integration Registry looks to have staying power. Yet many enterprises haven't even started to tap its power yet. We spoke with Chris Kurt, the program manager for UDDI.org (and Microsoft's group program manager for Web services) to get a nuts-and-bolts look at how UDDI works -- and how IT can get started using it today. . . UDDI provides an XML-based method for businesses to describe themselves and the Web-based services they offer. The UDDI Business Registry is the public database where companies register themselves. Public UDDI registries are now fully operational. Beta testing wrapped up in early May. IBM and Microsoft are running the public databases. Ariba dropped out, but Hewlett-Packard will launch a third registry later this year. The power of UDDI is the power of ad-hoc discovery of new business partners and processes. If the emerging world of Web services is to flourish, companies need a seamless, automated way to find other businesses on the Internet and determine if their systems and applications are able to work together via the Web. In short, UDDI lets companies do three things: (1) Discover each other; (2) Define how they can interact via the Internet; and (3) Share all this information via an open, global registry... UDDI is a good example of what happens when developers begin thinking about delivering apps as services. The registry is lightweight (it doesn't hold information but links to it); message-based (connections are made by passing XML documents rather than hard-coded integration); and supports highly-distributed apps (even though the look-up database itself is centralized in several locations). Today, UDDI requires too much manual work. The true power of UDDI will come when development tools automatically create the WDSL files to describe newly-created apps and delivers them seamlessly to the public UDDI databases. Also important will be UDDI links within key enterprise apps, such as ERP, supply chain and procurement. Such apps should one day be able to expose the Web services they offer as part of their installation process. UDDI is all about ad-hoc business relationships -- 'discovery,' as it name implies. To that extent, long-time business partners may share their Web services more directly. But as e-business grows, says UDDI.org's Kurt, companies will regularly be evaluating new suppliers, as well as seeking an automated way to learn about the new Web services and interfaces exposed by existing trading partners. Public UDDI registries augmented with private supply community UDDI databases should be able to take care of this gamut of e-business relationships. Meanwhile, version 2.0 of UDDI -- slated to be unveiled this month -- will among other improvements support richer taxonomies to better reflect the complexity of enterprises and the different types of Web services they aim to describe. There's no doubt that UDDI -- and the Web services model it aims to support--is in its infancy. But so far the UDDI.org group has moved quickly toward public implementations and kept the politics at a minimum."

  • [June 15, 2001] "Microsoft Brings Keyword Search to UDDI." By Ashlee Vance. In InfoWorld (June 15, 2001). "Microsoft and Realnames teamed on a keyword-based searching service Thursday for the UDDI registry, adding one of the first new features to a directory that has been billed as a 'Yellow Pages' for the Internet. The UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) registry aims to make it easier for businesses to provide information about their products and services on the Web as well as locate partners and customers. A number of registries that use differing protocols already exist on the Web, but Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard have joined the UDDI effort as a way to make business-to-business commerce on the Web work more smoothly. The vendors claim that thousands of businesses have signed up to use UDDI. Microsoft maintains one of the registry sites where companies can enter information about their business. The software maker is teaming with RealNames to make UDDI-related keywords accessible through the address bar in the Internet Explorer browser, said Christopher Kurt, group program manager for UDDI and Web Services at Microsoft. RealNames removes the need to type in sometimes hard-to-remember Web addresses by allowing companies to register simple keywords -- such as the name of a company or a product. When a user types in one of those keywords, they are taken to the Web sites of the company that registered the word, Kurt said. The system competes with a similar keyword service operated by America Online. In the context of UDDI, users will be able to type UDDI followed by a company name or portion of a company name into the address bar of Internet Explorer -- for example, UDDI flowers" The results would show a list of the businesses registered in UDDI that have flowers in their name. The service could be used by anyone, from a home user shopping for a cricket bat or a large manufacturer in need of raw materials, officials said. The keyword search will also take into account a user's location, returning searches based on the language spoken in the user's locale. When businesses sign up to use the RealNames service, they will be pointed to Microsoft's UDDI registry site in an attempt to encourage growth of the registry. Eventually, users will be able to submit their information to the UDDI registry directly from the RealNames site, said Nico Popp, chief technology officer of RealNames. The UDDI system, which was launched last month, contains three types of information, divided into what the vendors refer to as White, Yellow, and Green pages..." See also the announcement: "Microsoft and RealNames Announce Registration And Navigation Services for UDDI Initiative. Businesses Publish UDDI Records and Receive Worldwide Exposure Through Internet Explorer Browser When Registering Keywords."

  • [June 15, 2001] "Microsoft and RealNames Announce Registration And Navigation Services for UDDI Initiative. Businesses Publish UDDI Records and Receive Worldwide Exposure Through Internet Explorer Browser When Registering Keywords." - "Microsoft Corp. and RealNames Corp., the extended naming services company, today announced the integration of RealNames Keyword technology and naming services with the Microsoft Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry site. As a universal directory for e-commerce and other Web services, UDDI allows businesses and their products and services to be discovered and facilitates the efficient exchange of electronic information between them. Microsoft has enabled RealNames Keywords as a UDDI identifier for companies and their products and services throughout its UDDI registry site. RealNames also provides a one-click registration service for UDDI via its channel of Keyword Registries and Registrars. When a company registers a Keyword, it can automatically publish its business information through the Microsoft UDDI registry site. In addition, RealNames and Microsoft have enabled UDDI search through a human-friendly Keyword interface directly from the address bar of the Internet Explorer browser, making Internet Explorer the first major discovery and distribution channel for UDDI data available from every desktop."

  • [June 18, 2001]   UDDI Project Releases Version 2 Specification for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration.    An announcement from the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Project describes the publication of the UDDI Specification Version 2. The project is creating a "platform-independent, open framework for describing services, discovering businesses, and integrating business services using the Internet, as well as an operational registry that is available today." The Version 2 specification "delivers upon the roadmap and requirements outlined at the launch of UDDI in September 2000. New Features and improvements in the UDDI V2 specification will enable: (1) Description of Complex Organizations: Businesses can now describe and publish their organizational structure, including their business units, departments, divisions, and subsidiaries. (2) Improved support for internationalization: Businesses now have more flexibility in describing their business and services in multiple languages. (3) Additional categorization and identifier schemes: Businesses can use additional industry specific categories and identifiers to describe their businesses. For example, a chemical company may now use existing industry specific categories to describe themselves and their services. These categories can be validated during registration through third parties such as a chemical industry association. (4) Richer searching options: Businesses can now search the registry using more expressive query parameters, using more fields and complex combinations of fields. The UDDI Community is comprised of more than 280 business and technology leaders working together to enable companies to quickly, easily, and dynamically find, and transact with one another." [Full context]

  • [June 05, 2001] "Introduction to UDDI." From the DevXpert Web Services Depot [for VB Developers]. June 02, 2001. ['This article walks you through the basics of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration. It describes scenarios where UDDI would be useful and shows you how you can implement UDDI in those scenarios. Learn what UDDI is all about, how it works, and how you can program it.'] "One of the primary potential uses of Web services is for business-to-business integration. For example, company X might expose an invoicing Web service that the company's suppliers use to send electronic invoices. Similarly, a vendor V might expose a Web service for placing orders electronically. If company X wanted to purchase computer equipment electronically, it would need to search for all vendors who sell computer equipment electronically. To do this, company X needs a yellow pages-type directory of all businesses that expose Web services. This directory is called Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration or UDDI. UDDI is an industry effort started in September of 2000 by Ariba, IBM, Microsoft, and 33 other companies. Today, UDDI has over 200 community members. Like a typical yellow pages directory, UDDI provides a database of businesses searchable by the type of business. You typically search using business taxonomy such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) or the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). You could also search by business name or geographical location... If you write commercial business software, you should start thinking about leveraging UDDI to make it easy for your software users to publish their Web services and to find other Web services that they need. If you work inside a large organization with several divisions each busy building Web services, you should consider using an internal, UDDI-like, registry of Web services that are available within your organization. Whether for commercial or internal uses, you can program the UDDI APIs directly by sending and receiving SOAP messages. If you program in a COM-aware language you can use the Microsoft UDDI SDK, which handles all the SOAP and XML work and lets you program against a COM-based object model."

  • [May 11, 2001] "The Role of Private Uddi Nodes in Web Services, Part 1. Six species of UDDI." By Steve Graham (Web Services Architect, IBM Emerging Internet Technologies; previously: faculty member in the Department of Computer Science, the University of Waterloo). From IBM developerWorks. May 2001. ['Steve Graham introduces the concepts behind Web services discovery and gives a brief overview of UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration). He examines six variants of UDDI registries, highlighting the role each of these plays in a service-oriented architecture.'] "In service-oriented architectures, service descriptions and metadata play a central role in maintaining a loose coupling between service requestors and service providers. The service description, published by the service provider, allows service requestors to bind to the service provider. The service requestor obtains service descriptions through a variety of techniques, from the simple "e-mail me the service description" approach and the ever popular sneaker-net approach, to techniques such as Microsoft's DISCO and sophisticated service registries like the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), which is what I am going to examine here. UDDI defines four basic data elements within the data model in version 1.0: businessEntity (modeling business information), businessService (high level service description), tModel (modeling a technology type or service type), and bindingTemplate (mapping between businessService and tModels). I won't discuss the intricacies behind these elements, so if you need more basic information on UDDI, please visit the UDDI web site before continuing (see Resources). The set of operator nodes known as the UDDI business registry, or UDDI operator cloud, implies a particular programming model characterized by design-time service discovery. We need design-time discovery since it is often not feasible to implement dynamic discovery at run-time due to overwhelming complexity. However, the just-in-time integration value proposition of the IBM Web Services Initiative allows organizations to provide dynamic discovery and binding of Web services at run time. To do this, API characteristics and other non-functional requirements are specified as business policies at design time. This flexibility has important characteristics for loosely-coupled enterprise application integration, both within and between organizations. The role of the UDDI cloud to support a dynamic style of Web services binding is currently limited. However, the UDDI API and data model standard can still play a role in a service-oriented architecture. The notion of a private or non-operator UDDI node is critical to the emergence of a dynamic style of a service-oriented architecture... We have briefly examined the discovery role played by UDDI within a service-oriented architecture and enumerated six species of UDDI, each supporting different uses of a service-oriented architecture. In the next installment of this article, I will contrast the programming models that use private and operator UDDI nodes, and review requirements for functionality to make private UDDI nodes easier to use." Article also in PDF format. [cache]

  • [May 10, 2001] "UDDI: A Phone Book for Web Services." By Sean McGrath. In XML In Practice (April 17, 2002). "... The UDDI registry contains three types of service descriptions: 'white pages', 'yellow pages', and 'green pages'. White pages are searchable, human-readable information such as textual service descriptions and contact information. Yellow pages link business descriptions to standard business taxonomies, like NAICS (the US Government codes for industries) and UN/SPSC (the ECMA codes for products and services), as well as geographical descriptions. Finally, green pages describe online business processes and services, describe how to access the services over the Web using standard protocols, and, optionally, categorize the services... If the UDDI standard succeeds, then UDDI's big-name collaborators all stand to gain from their head start. Web services, like the World Wide Web as a whole, are powerful because they allow content to be used in unanticipated ways. Before you consider adopting UDDI for your business, make sure that more than one implementer for each of the standards being implemented exists..."

  • [May 03, 2001] "UDDI Business Registry Goes Live. Hewlett-Packard to Become Registry Operator." - "The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) project today announced that its global Business Registry is fully operational, marking the successful completion of live beta testing. Now supporting production-class operations, the UDDI public Business Registry is a cornerstone of Web services architecture because it enables businesses to register and discover Web services via the Internet. The launch is a milestone for the fast-growing UDDI project, which has expanded from an initial 36 companies in September 2000 to more than 260 community members today. The UDDI Business Registry is a global, public, online directory that gives businesses a uniform way to describe their services, discover other companies' services, and understand the methods necessary to conduct e-business with a particular company. A key element of the infrastructure that makes Web services a reality, the UDDI Business Registry is an implementation of the UDDI version 1 specification. Building on the UDDI momentum, Hewlett-Packard Co. has signed an agreement to become a UDDI Business Registry operator, along with IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. The existence of multiple operators helps ensure that global registry information is always available and accessible to all users everywhere. Hewlett-Packard expects to go live as an operator by the end of the year [2001]... The UDDI Community continues to work on enhanced versions of the UDDI specification. The version 2 specification is nearing completion: It is in review by the UDDI Community and should be made public within the next 60 days. The growth of the UDDI Community benefits the scope and maturity of the UDDI specifications. UDDI is a community of more than 260 business and technology leaders committed to the acceleration and broadening of business-to-business (B2B) integration and commerce through the Internet. The UDDI specification uses XML to provide businesses with a uniform way to describe their services, discover other companies' services, and understand the methods necessary to conduct e-business with a particular company. The UDDI Community expects to turn the UDDI specification over to a standards organization after the next two versions are released." [Announcement from Microsoft]

  • [April 25, 2001] "RosettaNet Enables UDDI Universal Business Registry for Trading Partners in the High-Technology Industry. Consortium Registers Partner Interface Processes(PIPs) to Facilitate Discovery and Management of Online Relationships." - "RosettaNet today announced the registration of 83 RosettaNet business process standards within the UDDI Universal Business Registry, making RosettaNet one of the largest contributors of e-business process standards to UDDI thus far. This registration effort seeks to simplify the registration and discovery of e-business processes by and between companies using RosettaNet standards to transact business across the supply chain. An e-business registry specification serves an important function and is most commonly referred to as an electronic version of the Yellow, Green and White Pages. A universal registry structure allows companies to register the attributes of their e-business environment: who they are, how to find them and the types of electronic business relationships they can support. It is a focused way to discover partners and determine their capabilities, regardless of industry or geography. Assuming both partners are speaking the same language, they can also choose to begin a 'plug and play' e-business relationship... This announcement is among the first in a series of cross-industry XML standards initiatives from RosettaNet, the leader in global e-business process standards for the Information Technology (IT), Electronic Components (EC), and Semiconductor Manufacturing (SM) industries. A coalition of 260 plus business and technology leaders are facilitating the development and deployment of an open, Internet-based Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification. UDDI is an important building block in enabling businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact business with one another using the electronic business processes they support... RosettaNet views the UDDI initiative as a complementary enabler to RosettaNet's business process standards in the high-technology industry. Part of the information captured during the registration process includes the specific business processes and protocols supported by each participating company. By registering as a RosettaNet-capable trading partner, along with the specific RosettaNet PIP versions supported, UDDI can be used as a convenient way for companies in the IT, EC and SM supply chain to discover each other and their capabilities. RosettaNet is encouraging its partners to register with UDDI to speed connectivity between RosettaNet-enabled trading partners, lower the cost of e-business discovery and integration, and facilitate and simplify the set-up of supply chain relationships, especially with small- and mid-size trading partners..." See "RosettaNet."

  • "UDDI Project Introduction." By Christopher Kurt. See the Federal CIO Council XML Working Group Meeting Minutes, February 14, 2001.

  • [March 14, 2001]   IBM Announces WebSphere Technology for Developers.    IBM has announced the availability of 'WebSphere Technology for Developers', described as infrastructure software middleware which "enables companies to develop, deploy and integrate next-generation e-business applications, such as those for business-to-business e-commerce. WebSphere supports business applications from simple Web publishing through enterprise-scale transaction processing. WebSphere Technology for Developers is available at no charge on a limited basis today from IBM sales representatives and business partners." The WebSphere Technology for Developers is presented as "the first software in the industry that supports the variety of open standards necessary to develop and securely deploy Web services, including: (1) Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI), which enables businesses to describe themselves, publish technical specifications on how they want to conduct e-business with other companies and search for other businesses that provide goods and services they need all via online UDDI registries; (2) Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) -- IBM is the first to implement and integrate HTTPS, HTTP Authentication and SOAP security, including digital signatures, enabling end-to-end authentication, integrity and non-repudiation for SOAP messages. (3) Java2 Enterprise Edition J2EE; (4) Web Services Description Language (WSDL), which describes programs accessible via the Internet or other networks; (5) Enhanced integration of leading XML technologies." [Full context]

  • [February 14, 2001] "Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) and the U.S. Federal Government." By Eliot Christian (USGS). Presented to the CIO Council XML Working Group. February 14, 2001. "Registry operator assigns a unique key to each registered business and service; operators synchronize updates among all UDDI registries Citizens, businesses, agencies, search engines, and software apps query the registry to discover services Agencies, businesses, and standards organizations register different types of services Agencies register themselves and their services Citizen, business, or agency uses service data to facilitate interaction..."

  • [January 21, 2001] "UDDI4J: Matchmaking for Web services." By Doug Tidwell (Web Services Evangelist, IBM). From IBM DeveloperWorks. January 2001. "As part of its continued commitment to Web services, IBM has released UDDI4J, an open-source Java implementation of the Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration protocol (UDDI). In this article, we'll discuss the basics of UDDI, the Java API to UDDI, and how you can use this technology to start building, testing, and deploying your own Web services..."

  • UDDI XML Structure Reference. September 6, 2000. 30 pages. Copyright Ariba, IBM, Microsoft. "The programmatic interface provided for interacting with systems that follow the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UUDI) specifications make use of Extended Markup Language (XML) and a related technology called Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP), which is a specification for using XML in simple message based exchanges. The UDDI Programmers API Specification defines approximately 30 SOAP messages that are used to perform inquiry and publishing functions against any UDDI compliant service registry. This document outlines the details of each of the XML structures associated with these messages. The purpose of UDDI compliant registries is to provide a service discovery platform on the World Wide Web. Service discovery is related to being able to advertise and locate information about different technical interfaces exposed by different parties. Services are interesting when you can discover them, determine their purpose, and then have software that is equipped for using a particular type of Web service complete a connection and derive benefit from a service. A UDDI compliant registry provides an information framework for describing services exposed by any entity or business. Using this framework the description of a service that is managed by a UDDI registry is information about the service itself. In order to promote cross platform service description that is suitable to a 'black-box' Web environment, this description is rendered in cross-platform XML. The information that makes up a registration consists of four data structure types [businessEntity = 'information about the party who publishes information about a service'; businessService = 'descriptive information about a particular family of technical services'; bindingTemplate = 'technical information about a service entry point and construction specs'; tModel='descriptions of specifications for services or taxonomies. Basis for technical fingerprints']. This division by information type provides simple partitions to assist in the rapid location and understanding of the different information that makes up a registration. These four types make up the complete amount of information provided within the UDDI service description framework. Each of these XML structures contains a number of data fields that serve either a business or technical descriptive purpose. Explaining each of these structures and the meaning and placement of each field is the primary purpose of this document. These structures are described in the UDDI API programmer's schema. The schema defines approximately 20 requests and 10 responses, each of which contain these structures, references to these structures, or summary versions of these structures. In this document we first explain the core structures, and then provide descriptions of the individual structures used for the request/response XML SOAP interface." [cache; cache, .DOC]

  • UDDI Programmer's API Specification. September 6, 2000. 60 pages. Copyright Ariba, IBM, Microsoft. "This document describes the programming interface that is exposed by all instances of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry. The primary audience for this document is programmers that want to write software that will directly interact with a UDDI Operator Site. UDDI is the name of a group of web-based registries that expose information about a business or other entity and its technical interfaces (or API's). These registries are run by multiple Operator Sites, and can be used by any business that wants to make their information available, as well as anyone that wants to find that information. There is no charge for using the basic services of these operating sites. By accessing any of the public UDDI Operator Sites, anyone can search for information about web services that are made available by or on behalf of a business. The benefit of having access to this information is to provide a mechanism that allows others to discover what technical programming interfaces are provided for interacting with a business for such purposes as electronic commerce, etc. The benefit to the individual business is increased exposure in an electronic commerce enabled world. The information that a business can register includes several kinds of simple data that help others determine the answers to the questions 'who, what, where and how'. Simple information about a business -- information such as name, business identifiers (D&B numbers, etc.), and contact information answers the question 'Who?' 'What?' involves classification information that includes industry codes and product classifications, as well as descriptive information about the services that are available for electronic interchange. Answering he question 'Where?' involves registering information about the URL or email address (or other address) through which each type of service is accessed. Finally, the question 'How?' is answered by registering references to information about specifications that describe how a particular software package or technical interface functions. These references are called tModels in the UDDI documentation. This programmer's reference, coupled with the UDDI API schema (uddiAPI.xsd), defines a programming interface that is available for free public use. Software developers, businesses and others are encouraged to define products and tools that make use of this API and to build registries that are compatible with the API defined in this specification." 'Appendix C' documents 'XML Usage' (Valid Language Codes, Default Language Codes, Validation: XML namespace declaration, XML encoding, etc.). [cache]

  • IBM resources. - Web services based on UDDI.

  • [February 17, 2001]   IBM Web Services Toolkit Provides New Support for UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL.    The updated Version 2.2 IBM Web Services Toolkit from alphaWorks labs provides a client API to access a UDDI registry; the client API makes use of the UDDI4J API also available from IBM. The updated Web Services Browser which can browse a complete UDDI registry in a tree-view format; it may be used to browse through web services published with the Web Services Client API, publish and unpublish services, view and save services' descriptions. Also included in the 2.2 release are several SOAP-related technical previews: "(1) the COM pluggable provider is an Apache SOAP pluggable provider that takes incoming requests to the SOAP server and delegates them to a COM object; (2) the Web Services Management Technology Preview introduces a management interface which allows SOAP server resources to be managed; (3) SOAP Chaining Framework preview demonstrates how modules of code (or Handlers) can be chained before and/or after the actrual Web Service being invoked." Updated WSDL tools, documentation, and configuration setup utilities are also provided in WSTK Version 2.2. The IBM Web Services Toolkit is "a runtime environment as well as demo/examples to design and execute web-service applications to find one another and collaborate in business transactions without programming requirements or human intervention." [Full context]

  • UDDI FAQ document - From IBM. "The following questions and answers provide an overview of the initiative for the Universal Description Discovery Integration (UDDI) standard. Three companies (Ariba, IBM and Microsoft) have taken the lead on bringing this standard to the marketplace with the expectation that the list of partners will increase exponentially in the future. Read this information to learn how companies will start promoting and searching for worldwide products and services.

  • [January 29, 2001] UDDI for US government information: "Eliot Christian (USGS) discussed his work regarding the ways in which people discover information about the U.S. Government. Current web search engines present information about the Federal Government in a haphazard manner. In many instances, the web surfer must be versed in the structure of the government in order to be able to find the item for which he is searching. This is not an ideal method of presenting the government online for the general public, which is fairly ignorant of governmental structure. XML can make the search process easier for the average American. Mr. Christian proposed presenting Universal Discovery Description and Integration, a set of business to business applications and industry standards, at the next WG meeting. Universal Discovery Description and Integration uses XML to create a set of government white, yellow, and blue pages." See:Meeting Minutes. Federal CIO Council XML Working Group, Meeting Minutes. January 17, 2001. American Institute of Architects (Board Room). [cache]

  • [January 25, 2001] "IBM Technology Lets B2B Fingers Do the Walking." By Wylie Wong. In CNET News.com (January 25, 2001). "IBM is giving the open-source community a Java technology that will allow businesses to connect to a giant online directory for conducting e-commerce transactions. IBM is donating the software code for a Java application programming interface (API), or a set of instructions, that connects businesses to a giant online 'Yellow Pages' created by Microsoft and IBM. The online directory, called the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Business Registry, will help companies advertise their services and find one another so they can conduct Web transactions. The project is supported by more than 100 companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Nortel Networks. Big Blue is giving away the Java technology to its own open-source effort called the IBM developerWorks Open Source Zone. Open-source efforts allow anyone to modify and redistribute the software. Bob Sutor, IBM's program director for e-business standards strategy, said companies can use the donated technology, called UDDI for Java, so they can link their services to the online registry. Companies supporting the open-source project include Compaq Computer, Bowstreet, CrossGain, DataChannel. Sutor said the group will soon meet to discuss how to improve the product in the future. Sutor added that the Java technology and UDDI project are all part of IBM's efforts to create the technology for Web-based software and services..."

  • [December 22, 2000] "UDDI: An XML Web Service." By Chris Lovett. From MSDN 'Extreme XML' Column (December 18, 2000). ['Columnist Chris Lovett examines the ins and outs of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Service.'] "The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Service is now up and running at Microsoft, IBM, and Ariba. This is an online Web Service that you can use from your applications to dynamically discover other online services, all neatly packaged in a simple XML interface. For Extreme XML readers, passing XML around between client application and middle tier servers is nothing new. We've been doing this since 1998. It is nice, however, to see ongoing industry momentum in this direction that results in useful services like this one. So let me just dive right in to the nitty-gritty. All you really need to know is the URL to post the XML to. It took some digging to find the following three URLs... Conclusion: If you're building applications that need to dynamically wire up to services provided by external business partners, then you definitely need to think about wiring your applications to the UDDI registry. Think of it as though it were DNS for the business application layer. The interesting thing is that you could add, change, and remove access points in real time and thereby work around the one week or more delay involved in DNS propagation. Many people are asking what to do after finding a company and its registered services in the UDDI directory. Well, UDDI does not claim to solve everything. Attempting to spec out the master business-to-business protocol that encompasses everything ever invented is a huge undertaking and probably will never happen. The UDDI theory is that your applications will know how to do business with some well-known kinds of business protocols, and these protocols will be described in a well-known way so that you can dynamically find other businesses that support that protocol. Alternatively, you may have a small number of well-known, trusted global business partners with whom you are simply using UDDI to find new services provided by those partners. In this case, you probably already have other trusted channels established for downloading the adapters needed to connect to each service. Bottom line: UDDI is definitely a big step in the right direction." See also the UDDI drill-down example.

  • [November 28, 2000] "UDDI b2b Project Gears Up for Beta." By Jeffrey Burt. In eWEEK (November 26, 2000). "The business-to-business directory framework initiative spearheaded by Ariba Inc., IBM and Microsoft Corp. has launched the public beta testing phase of its business registry. The UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) project, which is based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), was announced in September. It is designed to create a single standard by which busi nesses can list e-commerce Web sites, contact information, payment options and B2B capabilities. The goal is to streamline online transactions and make it easier for businesses to find one another on the Web via a search engine. Initially backed by three dozen companies -- including American Express Co., Commerce One Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., i2 Technologies Inc., Loudcloud Inc., SAP AG and Sun Microsystems Inc. -- the coalition's membership has jumped to 130 companies. The list now includes Hewlett-Packard Co., which for more than a year had been working on a similar XML-based registry called eSpeak. The HP tools automate discovery and interaction among Web-based services. For its part, UDDI defines White Pages (general information), Yellow Pages (business categories) and Green Pages (for how business is conducted). Last month, the consortium unveiled WSDL, or Web Services Descrip tion Language, on which UDDI is based. WSDL, an XML format created by Microsoft and IBM developers, is expected to be submitted to a standards body within 18 months. WSDL describes network services as endpoints that exchange messages telling what services are available. The language is partially based on Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol Contract Language and IBM's NASSL, or Network Accessible Service Specification Language. Each of UDDI's three initial movers -- Ariba, IBM and Microsoft -- operates a registry server that can interoperate with servers of the other coalition members. That way, as information is entered onto a registry server, it is also shared by the servers of the other companies; future versions of the UDDI Business Registry will include other companies as operators..."

  • [November 16, 2000] "Will UDDI Make B2B Connections Universal?" By Paul Korzeniowski. In Server/Workstation Expert Volume 11, Number 11 (November 2000), pages 8-10. "The widespread interest in B2B connections has lead to an array of standards designed to ease the integration of backend applications, such as accounts payable, billing, order entry and fulfillment. Ariba Inc., Sunnyvale, CA; IBM Corp., Armonk, NY; and Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, have spearheaded an initiative to develop a broad suite of specifications that will act as an online phone book, not only helping a company contact its trading partners, but also providing the data needed to integrate their e-business applications. The troika convinced 33 other companies, including American Express, Andersen Consulting, Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., SAP AG, and Sun Microsystems Inc., to support their Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) project. The members plan to create standard formats so businesses can describe their operations and indicate how they want to receive e-commerce transactions. 'The UDDI supporters are launching a D-Day type invasion and trying to establish a beachhead for B2B ecommerce exchanges...' UDDI aims to make B2B connections universal by providing businesses with a common mechanism to publish Web service information on the Internet. Similar to the impact HTML had on consumers, the specifications attempt to outline a common Web site publishing format so firms can more easily exchange B2B data. The members have begun this process by taking standards that already exist -- TCP/IP, XML, and industry-specific schemas such as RosettaNet -- and building a common Web services stack that can be shared on top of them. Although based on XML, the specification can describe services implemented using other languages, such as HTML, Java and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The key is the construction of an online business registry, so companies that have never done business with one another will be able to download a set of standard data attributes about each other and use it to build B2B connections. The UDDI Business Registry will be divided into three sections: (1) The White Pages section will include a description of each company, contact information and business identifier numbers. (2) The Yellow Pages section will outline the categories of business served by each listed company. Initially, the categories will focus on geography, industry and product. (3) The Green Pages section will contain information on how to do ecommerce with each listed company, including business processes and data format information. UDDI members have signed contracts to complete the specifications, build the registry, and enter their own data. The process has been divided into three stages. Version 1, which has been completed, encompasses business units, three taxonomies and service descriptions. In March of next year, a second release expects to cover corporations, more taxonomies and layered services. In December of 2001, UDDI is expected to be enhanced with associations, custom taxonomies and workflow features. The group plans to develop these specifications through an open, inclusive process. After managing the design process through the third version, they expect to transition it all to a standards body and then turn license control and intellectual property over to a third party. Even though the consortium still lacks support from established vendors Hewlett-Packard Co., Cupertino, CA, and Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, CA, Zona's Staff thinks its future is bright. 'None of the other B2B standards initiatives have tried to address as broad a set of interoperability issues as Ariba, IBM and Microsoft have done with UDDI,' he concludes. 'The architecture seems well thought out so now the question becomes whether or not they can deliver it and I think they will'."

  • [December 12, 2000] "Documentum Extends Leadership Role in XML-Based Enterprise Content Management, Becomes Advisor to the UDDI Project. Advisory Role Enables Documentum to Help Drive Open Standards Development for Next Generation Web Services Facilitating e-Business for Global 2000." - "Documentum, a leading provider of Internet-scale content management solutions for powering e-business applications, today announced that they have become an advisor to the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Project, a coalition of business and technology leaders working to create a platform-independent, open framework for describing Web services, discovering e-businesses, and integrating business-to-business services using the Internet. Documentum's advisory role demonstrates the company's ongoing commitment and leadership in the development of open standards for B2B interoperability, facilitating e-business and enterprise content management for Global 2000 companies. [Said] Howard Shao, chief technology officer and co-founder at Documentum. 'Leveraging the years of experience we've gained serving the enterprise content management needs of Global 2000 companies, it is our goal to help UDDI determine and create comprehensive open standards required by the greater B2B community to enable seamless content interchange. In addition, our close ties to the UDDI project will provide users of the 4i eBusiness Platform with the ability to quickly and easily create and leverage Web services in order to expedite the swift development and implementation of the B2B applications they need.' 'Businesses of all sizes can benefit from UDDI, because the standards we are developing comprehensively address problems that restrict the growth and synergies of B2B commerce and Web services,' said Tom Glover, general program manager at UDDI. 'The UDDI standard is not industry-specific. Any industry, worldwide, offering products and services can benefit from this open initiative. We appreciate the support given to us by Documentum and welcome their extensive B2B experience'."

  • [December 01, 2000] "Oracle joins effort to build e-business directory [UDDI]." By Wylie Wong. In CNET News.com (November 30, 2000). "Oracle on Thursday [2000-11-30] announced it has joined an effort led by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba to create a Web directory that will allow businesses to find each other online. Oracle was previously the largest software maker absent from the project, which now has about 130 supporters. Oracle executives said it joined the project after Ariba, IBM and Microsoft made the process to create the technology less proprietary. The trio of companies in September proposed a Web standard and a new initiative that lets businesses register in an online directory aimed at helping companies advertise their services in order to find each other to conduct Web transactions. The project, which began with three dozen supporters, has signed on 130 companies, including Dell Computer, Intel, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, Andersen Consulting and Ford Motor. Before joining the effort last month, Hewlett-Packard executives said they also balked at joining the effort because Ariba, IBM and Microsoft had veto power over the process of creating the Web standard and the online directory. The three companies then opened up the decision-making process to include more companies, resulting in HP and now Oracle joining the effort. Oracle was originally skeptical of the project because Microsoft and IBM had veto power, Magee said, even though they didn't sell e-business applications, where the Web standard and online directory comes into play. The proposed standard will allow businesses to describe the services they offer and allow those services to be located by other businesses using the online directory..."

  • [November 27, 2000] "In the Books. Can yet another vendor consortium deliver on a cross-industry B2B e-commerce standard?" By Claudia Willen. In Intelligent Enterprise Volume 3, Number 17 (November 10, 2000), pages 10-12. "...UDDI advocates said the standard is based on extensible markup language (XML), and HTTP and Domain Name System (DNS) protocols, and that UDDI also addresses cross-platform programming issues through its adoption of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messaging specifications found at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web site. UDDI is promoting the standard as an 'open' one and invites any organization to participate by signing up in the forthcoming UDDI Business Registry. UDDI hopes to transfer the registry specifications to an independent industry standards group by late 2001 or 2002. IBM, Ariba, and Microsoft plan to launch interoperable beta versions of the registry in fall 2000. UDDI envisions the business registry as an XML Web directory containing standardized data and business rules posted by member companies to describe themselves and how they want to conduct e-commerce, including specifications about the type of transaction data and formats they can handle. The information will be structured in three sections: white pages containing company descriptions, contact information, and business ID numbers; yellow pages with companies organized into business categories, such as products, geographic regions, and industry sectors; and green pages, which will provide transaction requirements. Other companies will be able to look up this information for free. Because the registry is XML-based, theoretically the transacting companies could conduct e-business on a machine-to-machine or system-to-system level, according to UDDI members. The registry can also describe services implemented using HTML, Java, CORBA, Microsoft Windows DNA, and other programming models and languages. Online trading community provider VerticalNet Inc. recently joined UDDI and plans to move its network of more than 120,000 suppliers, of which 8,000 have VerticalNet-hosted storefronts or e-commerce centers, into a UDDI-compliant registry. Blair LaCorte, VerticalNet senior e-commerce VP, said that UDDI 'is the perfect complement to our supplier integration strategy which leverages internationally accepted standards to promote seamless trade between our members.' Industry observers said it's still too early to determine if this latest attempt to set e-commerce standards will be more successful than competing efforts from other vendors and organizations."

  • [November 22, 2000]   IBM's XML and Web Services Development Environment.    New from IBM alphaWorks labs: XML and Web Services DE. "The IBM XML and Web Services Development Environment is the first development environment that creates open, platform-neutral Web services for deployment across heterogeneous systems. This tool allows HTML, Java, SQL and XML developers to quickly extend existing e-business applications so that they can deliver business informational Web services. Database developers can also use SQL as a programming language to quickly build data-aware Web services. Web developers can create Web services with minimal knowledge of Java, XML or SOAP. It turns the power of XML and Java technology into competitive e-business advantage. It provides all of the tooling needed to create Web services... (1) Discover - Browse the UDDI Business Registry to locate existing Web services for integration. The Web becomes an extension of the development environment. (2) Create/Transform - Use powerful XML editing functions to quickly develop new Web services. Complete transformation (edit and mapping) tools are also provided so that developers can create Web services from existing XML, Java, or SQL applications. (3) Build - Wrap existing bean components as SOAP-accessible services and describe them in the Web services description language (WSDL). Generate SOAP proxies to Web services described in WSDL. Generate bean skeletons from WSDL. Minimal knowledge of SOAP or WSDL is required. (4) Deploy - Deploy the Web service on the developer's machine or to a remote, production-level server for testing right away. After testing, publish the Web service immediately to the application server (WebSphere Application Server or Apache Tomcat). (5) Test - Test applications as they run locally or remotely, and get instant feedback. (6) Publish - In addition to creating and deploying Web services, the development environment can also publish them to the UDDI Business Registry. This advertises your Web services so that other businesses can access them."

  • [November 16, 2000] "UDDI Business Registry Goes Live. Momentum For UDDI Project Grows With Public Beta Launch, Participation Triples." - "The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project -- a broad coalition of business and technology leaders -- today announced the initial public beta testing of the UDDI Business Registry, a Web service designed to accelerate the adoption of business-to-business (B2B) integration and commerce on the Internet. The UDDI Project also announced that 94 new members have joined since the launch two months ago, bringing the total number of participants to 130. By listing a Web service in the UDDI Business Registry, companies are opening the door for the establishment of new e-business relationships and added efficiency to existing relationships. Companies can publish identifying information and indicate a preferred means of conducting e-commerce transactions. Businesses registered are located more easily by B2B customers and partners via the registry's search mechanism. The globally distributed operation of the UDDI Business Registry is currently shared by Ariba, Microsoft and IBM. Each company operates a registry server which interoperates with the other participants' servers, ensuring that information registered at one site is shared with all other operator registries. The UDDI Business Registry is a platform-neutral implementation of the UDDI draft specification announced last month. Future versions of the Business Registry will add other companies as operators. Having a business service listed in the UDDI Business Registry is free, companies can begin the registration process at: http://www.uddi.org/register.html. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project is a 120 member plus coalition of business and technology leaders committed to the acceleration and broadening of business-to-business integration and commerce on the Internet."

  • [November 07, 2000] "UDDI standard: A ticket to global B2B?" By Cameron Sturdevant. In eWEEK (November 05, 2000). "Unlikely collaborators microsoft Corp. and IBM, along with Arriba Inc., have created UDDI, an ambitious core specification for business-to-business integration. After examining the new specification, eWeek Labs believes the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration standard should be on the IT agenda of any organization that wants to conduct business over the Internet. Introduced in August, UDDI is intended to be an Internet standard for creating an online business registry. At the high level, the standard defines White Pages (general information), Yellow Pages (business categories) and Green Pages (how business is conducted)... Last month, the three companies announced the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) -- the cornerstone of UDDI -- which allows businesses to describe their offerings in a standard way. Microsoft and IBM employees authored WSDL and the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format for describing network services will be developed cooperatively -- at least for the near future. WSDL is partially based on Microsoft's SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) Contract Language and IBM's NASSL (Network Accessible Service Specification Language). WSDL attempts to do something similar to Hewlett-Packard Co.'s eSpeak initiative, which is an open, standards-based group of tools that automates discovery and interaction among Web-based services. It's too soon to say which specification is likely to prevail. Further, our examination of the actual working products from both initiatives shows that solid guidelines are still months -- or even a year or more -- in the future. WSDL describes network services as endpoints that exchange messages telling what services are available. The language is limited to message formats or network protocols that conform to SOAP 1.1, HTTP get/post and MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). The specification leaves open-ended the other message formats that will be supported..."

  • [October 18, 2000] jUDDI: Bowstreet Hosts Open Source Java-based UDDI Toolkit Development on SourceForge. Bowstreet announced 'jUDDI' as "the industry's first implementation of broad industry-initiated standard to link e-businesses to the 'Yellow Pages' of B2B web services. The jUDDI implementation, available immediately, comes after Ariba, IBM and Microsoft unveiled a draft specification of the UDDI standard. Bowstreet has introduced jUDDI as free, open source software that is available for anyone to use. UDDI -- which stands for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration -- is designed to make it easy for businesses to create partnerships and new business models using platform-neutral application components called web services. The initiative will create a distributed registry, or Yellow Pages, for publishing, finding and using web services that companies wish to offer to the marketplace. Bowstreet's jUDDI (pronounced 'Judy') is an open source Java-based toolkit for developers to make their applications UDDI-ready. jUDDI-enabled applications will be able to look up a web service in a UDDI registry. A retail chain, for example, could use the toolkit to jUDDI-enable its online catalog. With jUDDI, the catalog could call another company's shopping cart and a third company's transaction web service, creating an instant web-based store. Companies will eventually create many connections like this, spawning "business webs," or dynamic collections of businesses, on a massive scale. jUDDI and UDDI will complement DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) -- the directory services standard launched last year by Bowstreet, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and the Sun-Netscape Alliance. Directories provide users with a powerful way to manage web services, including web services published in UDDI registries. Bowstreet sees synergy between DSML and UDDI and will actively explore a relationship between the two specifications, according to Tauber, who is chairman of the DSML 2.0 working group. The jUDDI project is hosted at SourceForge and available as downloadable software from www.juddi.org. jUDDI is the latest in a long line of Bowstreet's industry firsts that advance intercompany interoperability on the Internet. 'UDDI, Microsoft's .NET, HP's e-Speak, ebXML, DSML and a host of other initiatives confirm what Bowstreet customers already know,' said Bob Crowley, Bowstreet's president and chief executive officer. 'They know that plug-and-play e-commerce is possible and inevitable for the 21st century, because they're doing it.' Bowstreet, a founding advisor to the UDDI initiative, was one of the first companies to recognize the importance of web services and act on it commercially. In 1998, the company announced a software architecture for deploying and managing web services across multiple vendor platforms."

  • Microsoft UDDI site "Microsoft will support UDDI across its platform, and will include a UDDI SDK on MSDN. This SDK describes the registry APIs, letting you build clients that enter information into the UDDI registries, and retrieve information from them."

  • North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) - Classification for the UDDI yellow pages

  • Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC) - " The UNSPSC was created when the United Nations Development Program and Dun & Bradstreet merged their separate commodity classification codes into a single open system. The UNSPSC Code is the first coding system to classify both products and services for use throughout the global marketplace."

  • [September 06, 2000] UDDI on Sourceforge. "An open source Java implementation of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification." ['I have started a SourceForge project for anyone interested in working on an open source Java implementation of UDDI. -- James Tauber, Director XML Technology, Bowstreet

  • UDDI 'subset': Web Services Description Language (WSDL)"

  • [November 08, 2000] "Understanding ebXML, UDDI and XML/edi." By David Webber and Anthony Dutton. From XML.org. November 06, 2000. "The past six months have seen an extensive and accelerating amount of work on providing practical implementations and technical specifications to enable the development of open interoperable eBusiness interactions. This work is focused around utilizing the W3C XML syntax and the Internet as the underpinning technologies. In this context, the focus of the ebXML initiative is to develop a single global electronic market based on an open public XML-based infrastructure enabling the global use of electronic business information in an interoperable, secure and consistent manner by all parties. A primary objective of ebXML is to lower the barrier of entry to electronic business in order to facilitate trade, particularly with respect to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME's) and developing nations. The ebXML initiative is sponsored by UN/CEFACT and OASIS and is an open public initiative with now over one thousand participants. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) initiative by contrast was started by IBM, Ariba and Microsoft about five months ago as a means to create an implementation of their technologies that deliver the underpinning for the interoperation of netmarket places and integrating business services using the Internet. UDDI is based around the concept of standard registry services that provide Yellow, White and Green Page business functionality. The UDDI focus is on providing large organizations the means to reach out to and manage their network of smaller business customers. The biggest issues facing UDDI are ones of acceptance and buy-in from businesses themselves, and implementation issues of scalability and physical implementation. By contrast the XML/edi Initiative was start three years ago as a grass-roots initiative to promote the use of XML for eBusiness. The XML/edi Vision includes the concept of the Fusion-of-Five: XML, EDI, Repositories, Templates and Agents to create next generation eBusiness. The ebXML and UDDI work represent embodiments of the XML/edi vision and as such we need to understand how far this work has come, and how much further is needed to fully deliver on the promise of XML and eBusiness... Within the software industry itself countries such as India and the Eastern European countries are already making significant in-roads into this domination as the labour pool for cost-effective development resources are stretched to the limit worldwide. Consequently over the next five years we can foresee that the industry is moving to an open global economy where new and profoundly different metrics will emerge. The measure of ebXML, UDDI and XML/edi will be how well they are able to provide and satisfy these needs."

  • [September 29, 2000] "IBM, Microsoft, Ariba release WSDL Specification." By Roberta Holland. In eWEEK (September 26, 2000). "Less than a month after a coalition of 36 companies announced a wide-ranging initiative to create a directory for Web services, IBM and Microsoft Corp. have released a new language specification to describe those services. IBM, Microsoft, Ariba Inc. and other companies joined together last month on the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) initiative, intended to form a collection of registries and databases describing what businesses do and how to access their services electronically. What IBM and Microsoft released Monday is an XML syntax to describe those services, called the Web Services Description Language. Ariba also helped in the effort, which essentially was a merger of existing technologies from IBM and Microsoft. Officials involved say WSDL will allow for better interoperability among Web services and development tools. The language is based both on IBM's Network Accessible Services Specification Language and Microsoft's SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) Contract Language. WSDL was developed outside of the UDDI group and will either formally be submitted to the coalition for a specification or be submitted to a separate standards organization, said Bob Sutor, IBM's program director for e-business standards strategy in Somers, N.Y. Sutor said WSDL will not be the only choice for describing Web services, adding that Microsoft and IBM felt it made sense to combine their efforts." The WSDL specification is available for review on the IBM and Microsoft web sites.

  • UDDI - An Executive Summary. By Sean MacRoibeaird (Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center). "The key item of consideration in the UDDI specifications is the 'Web service.' A Web service describes specific business functionality exposed by a company, usually through an Internet connection, for the purpose of providing a way for another company or software program to use the service. The UDDI specifications define a way to publish and discover information about Web services. UDDI aims to automate the process of publishing your preferred way of doing business, finding trading partners and have them find you, and interoperate with these trading partners over the Internet. UDDI relies upon a distributed registry of businesses and their service descriptions implemented in a common XML format. The UDDI Business Registry provides an implementation of the UDDI specification. Any company can access the registry on the Internet, enter the description of its business, reach a UDDI site and search through all the business services listed in the UDDI registry. There is no cost to access information in the registry. Though based on XML, the registry can also describe services implemented in HTML. CORBA, or any other type of programming model or language..." [cache]

  • [November 08, 2000] "DataChannel Joins Prominent UDDI Project. DataChannel Teams Up with Industry Leaders to Advance E-Commerce And B2B Integration." - "DataChannel Inc., a leader in XML-based enterprise information portal solutions, Tuesday announced its participation as a member of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project. Started in September, the UDDI Project is an industry initiative designed to broaden B2B integration and commerce on the Internet. Web services reflect a shift away from traditional desktop software applications and toward the availability of similar applications over the Internet. Guided by industry leaders, the UDDI Project creates a global, platform-independent, open framework for discovering businesses, describing services, and integrating businesses using the Internet. This open initiative allows companies to publish how they want to conduct business on the Internet. As a UDDI advisor, DataChannel helps explore related standards and technologies to determine how they can apply to future Web product and service offerings. DataChannel also reviews and comments on UDDI specifications and will register its business, contact information and supported Web services into the UDDI registry. 'Companies continue to support an increasing number of Web services,' said Norbert Mikula, chief technology officer for DataChannel. 'Just as we build our open, XML solutions to allow businesses to exchange information with anyone using the Internet, we strongly believe that a universal framework is necessary to ensure that businesses can transact with each other using their preferred applications. 'Business-to-business commerce stands to gain exponentially from the specifications that the UDDI initiative will provide, and we're pleased to be a part of this effort.' In addition to UDDI, DataChannel also participates in the ebXML initiative, which is co-sponsored by OASIS and UN/CEFACT. Brian Eisenberg, standards and technology liaison at DataChannel, is a co-editor of the Technical Architecture team, and Mikula sits on the Requirements team. Furthermore, DataChannel's Yan Xu is a member of the important XML protocols activity at the W3C."

  • [September 29, 2000] "Microsoft, IBM release directory specs." By James Evans. In Network World (September 29, 2000). "IBM and Microsoft have developed a language standard for the new Universal Description, Discovery and Integration business directory, which is designed to fuel business-to-business commerce. The standard, called Web Services Description Language (WSDL), is a mixture of both IBM's Network Accessible Services Specification Language and Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) contract language. SOAP is an open standards-based interoperability protocol that uses XML to provide a common messaging format to link together applications and services anywhere on the Internet regardless of operating system, object model or programming language. The companies are evaluating the appropriate path for submitting the specification to the industry as a draft for standardization. A coalition of 36 vendors and consultants are working on the UDDI business directory, which, at its core, will be an XML-based holding tank for what businesses do, the services they offer and how they interface with their computing systems. The registry announced in early September is expected to support a number of APIs for gathering and offering information. There will be three initial versions of the registry as it gradually becomes more elaborate. It initially will provide basic information and later will offer more detailed company information, such as how to deal with a specific business unit. Ariba, along with IBM and Microsoft, launched the UDDI business directory, which will be built on TCP/IP, HTML and XML. Beta testing is expected to begin sometime in October."

  • [September 14, 2000] "Standards will touch e-hubs, marketers alike." By Richard Karpinski. In B2B Magazine (September 11, 2000), pages 1, 41. "Based on extensible markup language, UDDI seeks to set a standard way for e-businesses to define themselves on the Internet. Some view specifications like UDDI as a threat to e-marketers, and say branding and marketing strategies will be lost when the next generation of e-commerce permits machines to talk to machines and automatically enable transactions. But UDDI proponents say it does not aim to override traditional marketing efforts but rather provide a basic infrastructure, on top of which future b-to-b marketing initiatives will ride. 'The fact that Ford has registered Ford.com isn't the end of their marketing efforts. It's the beginning,' said Boris Putanec, Ariba Inc.'s VP-corporate strategy. Putanec and others compare UDDI to the Web's domain name service--the underlying technology that translates Internet protocol addresses into fam-iliar domain names. On top of DNS is an entire infrastructure of Web sites, search engines and other services that actually make up the World Wide Web. . . The UDDI initiative comes amid efforts at defining XML-based standards to grease the b-to-b tracks. Last week, for example, a group of companies working on ebXML, a project to standardize the exchange of electronic business data, said it had created a team to standardize electronic contracts and trading partnerships using XML. The ebXML group -- a joint initiative of the United Nations and Oasis, an XML standards body -- aims to define so-called TPAs, or trading partner profiles, and agreements. TPAs move beyond mere supplier look-up and define detailed technical parameters necessary for two companies to conduct transactions over the Internet. Because IBM provided much of the early work on TPAs, the project may intersect with UDDI at some point. A consolidation of XML standards would be welcome. Despite XML's promise of simplifying electronic conversations between businesses, a number of XML 'standards' are standard in name only. For instance, both Ariba and Commerce One Inc. have used XML to create a method for describing products in their procurement catalogs. But the two company's methods are still incompatible. In contrast, there seems to be broad industry backing of UDDI. Ariba, along with IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp., proposed the UDDI standard and will be the first to roll out UDDI-supporting databases. The vendors promise to have their first UDDI products ready within 30 days."

  • [September 06, 2000] "Industry Leaders Join to Accelerate Business Integration and Commerce On the Internet." - "A broad coalition of business and technology leaders today announced the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project, a cross-industry initiative designed to accelerate and broaden business-to-business integration and commerce on the Internet. Growth of business-to-business commerce on the Internet faces challenges in scaling to universal adoption due to the multitude of technologies and standards used by businesses and e-marketplaces. UDDI will address these challenges by providing two things: First, UDDI defines a platform-neutral set of specifications to enable businesses to describe themselves and indicate their preferred means of conducting e-commerce transactions. Second, UDDI includes the shared operation of a globally distributed UDDI Business Registry. Through the UDDI Business Registry, companies publish information describing how they conduct commerce and search for other businesses that provide the capabilities, Web services or products they need. The goal of the UDDI Project is to offer the basic infrastructure for dynamic, automated integration of all e-commerce transactions and Web services. Similar to the impact HTML had for consumers on the Internet by providing a common Web site publishing format that fueled the Internet explosion, UDDI aims to make business-to-business commerce adoption universal by providing businesses with a common mechanism to publish Web services on the Internet. Marketplaces, application service providers (ASPs) and individual businesses can use UDDI-enabled applications to dynamically define the services they offer over the Web, publish those services in the UDDI Business Registry and utilize the registry to scalably connect with millions of other businesses globally. The UDDI Project is an open industry initiative in which any organization can participate and implement the specifications. The specifications build on core Internet standards -- including TCP/IP, HTML and XML -- and are independent of any underlying platform, language, object model, business application or marketplace. It is the intention of the UDDI members to transition the specifications to an industry standards body in the next 18 months." [alt URL]

  • [September 06, 2000] "IBM's Web Services architecture debuts. An architecture overview and interview with Rod Smith." By Dave Fisco. From IBM DeveloperWorks (September 2000). ['IBM developerWorks just released a interview with Rod Smith, VP of IBM Emerging Technologies, about Web Services, a model for doing development where they use XML messaging and SOAP to talk to each other'] Younghee says: "IBM made a huge headway with the Linux community as a very credible vendor, and even with the Open Source community as a credible vendor who is doing something real for their community. My fear is that with this UDDI announcement so tightly coupled with Microsoft, that there will be a backlash." Rod Smith answers: "I don't think that will happen. I'm going to use SOAP as the example. When we first started working with Microsoft, there was a little bit of that concern. And we said, our corner foundation is open standards. We believe the SOAP area is good, and now let's see where Microsoft stands. When the announcement came out and we said we were going to promote SOAP as an open standard and bring it forward accordingly, the response was unbelievable and positive because people want to do this type of integration. They have Microsoft-based solutions. They also have Java-based solutions. They have [Windows] NT-based solutions and they have Linux-based solutions. They need folks -- and I think IBM is the perfect position for this - who will help them do the integration, who will help them promote the technology to do that. I think to everyone's credit on SOAP, the response has been overwhelming. Looking at this from UDDI, I'm hoping it will have that same effect that says, gee, this whole area is exactly what we want. I think there will be more requirements coming through on services. What do we mean by standardization of SOAP and NASSL and other things so we can start to do interchange, and what do we mean by cross-platform here. Right now, we're just talking B2B in terms of UDDI Web Services. There are lots of things that are going to happen from the B2C direction with Web Services as well. People want to provide special aggregated applications for cell phones. And they want to do this in a Web Services model. You go to a city you're not familiar with and you want to find the closest Starbucks, and there is a set of Web Services available that not only does that for you, but also knows how to order the right coffee and debit your credit card as well. People think this is going to happen probably a little bit faster in the B2B space. But when I talked to them about time frames, I think we were talking about the same. So anyway, I think it is really fundamental that we talk about UDDI being an implementation. We need to do this because we always want applications driving our infrastructure. That was the success of Java. We got the technology out early and people utilized it. They came back and told us what worked and didn't work. And we evolved. So UDDI is an application, and we'll have other applications out there and uses for Web Services..."

  • [October 03, 2000] "XMLSolutions Joins Industry Leaders in Project to Accelerate Internet Commerce UDDI Standards Project to Provide Universal Specifications and Business Registry." - "XMLSolutions Corporation, a worldwide provider of software for the development and deployment of XML-based applications, today announced its endorsement and participation in the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project. The UDDI Project is a cross-industry initiative proposed by over 30 companies including IBM, Microsoft and Ariba. The project is designed to accelerate and broaden business-to-business integration and commerce on the Internet. The goal of the UDDI Project is to create the basic infrastructure for Internet transactions and services through a two-step process: defining a platform-neutral set of specifications to enable businesses to describe themselves and indicate their preferred means of conducting e-commerce transactions; and placing this information in an open, universally accessible business registry. Speaking about the UDDI Project at the eBusiness Integration Conference currently underway in San Francisco, Scott Cosby, Marketing Manager on e-business Technologies for IBM, said, 'There is a tremendous amount of momentum behind UDDI. We are looking forward to XMLSolutions' participation in UDDI as we evolve the specification to foster the next generation of e-business.' The UDDI Project utilizes industry standards such as XML and HTTP in setting the universal specifications that will permit dynamic business interaction over the Internet. Regardless of underlying platform, specific business application or marketplace, standards such as XML will enable direct computer-to-computer transactions via the Internet. XMLSolutions is a registered participant in the UDDI Project. XMLSolutions Corporation enables the secure, real-time B2B exchange of direct materials transactions over the Internet. By eliminating a company's EDI and XML dialect dependencies, XMLSolutions removes trade barriers, enabling uniform transactions among customers, exchanges, and trading partners of all sizes. The XMLSolutions integrated solution includes support for XML-to-XML transformations; EDI-to-XML translation; and over 3000 mission-critical, industry-specific EDI business documents."

  • [September 06, 2000] "webMethods Joins the UDDI Project to Contribute B2B Integration Expertise to New E-Commerce Standard. Collaboration enables dynamic, automated, integration to help companies rapidly build out their B2B e-commerce initiatives." - "webMethods, Inc., a leading provider of business-to-business integration (B2Bi) solutions, today announced the company has joined the UDDI Project. The UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) Business Registry and Project were developed through a collaboration of Ariba, IBM, and Microsoft. As a member of this industry leadership team, webMethods will participate in the development of a standard registry of services to help companies rapidly extend their B2B trading networks. As customers move their procurement, supply chain, marketplace and other business applications directly on the Internet, they will register these web-based applications as services in UDDI, making it easier for other businesses to discover and integrate with them. This will help large corporations ramp up to supporting tens of thousands of suppliers and customers online, while providing small businesses a standard way to be discovered and integrated into marketplaces and online applications. The UDDI Business Registry is platform- and implementation-neutral and has interfaces based on XML and SOAP. Although the registry is based on XML, the services it describes can be implemented using HTML, XML, Java, CORBA, Windows DNA or any other type of programming model or language. webMethods provides a complete B2Bi solution that allows organizations to effectively realize their e-commerce strategies. The webMethods product family was designed to provide broad support for open standards and protocols, such as XML, RosettaNet, ebXML, FpML, cXML, xCBL, OBI, OAG, ACORD, BizTalk framework and EDI. Through support of these standards, webMethods products provide seamless integration both within the enterprise and across the Internet to trading networks and B2B marketplaces."

  • [September 07, 2000] "Industry Leaders Join to Accelerate Business Integration And Commerce on the Internet Thirty-Six Companies Cooperate to Further the Growth of Internet Commerce Via Standards for Web Services." - "... Growth of business-to-business commerce on the Internet faces challenges in scaling to universal adoption due to the multitude of technologies and standards used by businesses and e-marketplaces. UDDI will address these challenges by providing two things: First, UDDI defines a platform-neutral set of specifications to enable businesses to describe themselves and indicate their preferred means of conducting e-commerce transactions. Second, UDDI includes the shared operation of a globally distributed UDDI Business Registry. Through the UDDI Business Registry, companies publish information describing how they conduct commerce and search for other businesses that provide the capabilities, Web services or products they need. The goal of the UDDI Project is to offer the basic infrastructure for dynamic, automated integration of all e-commerce transactions and Web services. The UDDI Business Registry provides an implementation of the UDDI specification. Any company can access the registry on the Internet, enter the description of its business, reach a UDDI site, or search through all business services listed in the UDDI registry. There is no cost to access information in the registry. Although based on XML, the registry can also describe services implemented using HTML, Java, CORBA, Microsoft Windows DNA, or any other type of programming model or language. The registry is implemented as a Web service and thus can be discovered, integrated and programmatically invoked using XML like any other Web service. Beta implementations of the UDDI Business Registry will be available from Ariba, IBM and Microsoft within 30 days. These implementations will interoperate with each other, ensuring that information registered at one site is shared with all other operator registries. Other interoperable implementations are expected in the future."

  • [September 15, 2000] "UDDI: A New Proposed Standard Delivers on Promises of the Internet for Businesses of All Sizes." From Microsoft [UDDI Web site]. 2000-09-06. "With almost unimaginable speed, e-commerce is transforming the business landscape. Groundbreaking Internet technologies are providing companies with the ability to interact with suppliers, partners, and customers online in real time. These electronic business-to-business relationships are creating incredible opportunities as organizations create powerful new ways to streamline supply chains, automate complex business processes, provide new services and reach new customers. Not since the Industrial Revolution has business faced such momentous or far-reaching change. But this is a revolution that is still in its earliest stages. While critical technologies are evolving quickly, major barriers remain. The complexity and cost inherent in sharing data over networks and across applications is a significant issue, but it is one that is being rapidly addressed by the advent of new standards and technologies such as extensible markup language (XML) and simple object access protocol (SOAP). But there is another problem. As the number of companies that offer Web-based services increases exponentially into the millions, how do buyers looking for a specific service find all of the potential sellers who can meet their needs? And once buyer and seller have hooked up, how do they ensure that they can integrate their systems to manage transactions smoothly? A new specification, called Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, or UDDI, appears to hold the answer. The result of a project initiated by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba, and announced today, UDDI will allow companies to publish information about the Web services they offer in a Universal Business Registry that will be accessible by anyone. If UDDI achieves widespread acceptance, say industry leaders, it will lead to rapid acceleration in the growth of online business-to-business commerce, helping companies of all sizes benefit from the global opportunities offered by the digital revolution. . . In simplest terms, UDDI will be a comprehensive directory of businesses operating in the online world and the Web-based services they offer. Sellers will participate without cost in the UDDI Universal Business Registry by providing contact information, product and service information. Buyers will then be able to search the registry -- again, without cost -- and locate companies that provide the products or services they need. Today, conducting a thorough search for vendors and suppliers is highly labor intensive, and in today's economy where the potential seller of a service may be located almost anywhere in the world, finding every possible vendor is virtually impossible. Existing online directories and marketplaces are a step forward, but they are usually limited by industry or region. The UDDI registry solves the problem by providing one central registry for businesses in any location and industry. In addition, the Universal Business Registry offers sophisticated search parameters that allow buyers to set parameters based on everything from geographic location to business category, service details, and technical product specifications. But in the world of electronic commerce, knowing that a company offers the services you need is not enough. In many cases, identifying a supplier is only the beginning of the process. Once a company has identified a suitable seller, there is important technical data that must be exchanged before a transaction can be completed. "

  • [September 06, 2000] "Bowstreet and Its Customers Embrace New UDDI E-Commerce Standards Initiative; Bowstreet Announces Support for UDDI Across Company's Product Line." - "Bowstreet, a leading provider of business web automation solutions for plug-and-play e-commerce, today announced that it will serve as a founding advisor to UDDI, the new e-commerce standards initiative announced today by Ariba, IBM, and Microsoft, and will integrate support for UDDI into the Bowstreet Business Web Factory and businessweb.com within 90 days of the availability of the specification. Bowstreet customers, who are already leveraging web services using the Business Web Factory to expand into new markets and create scalable new e-business models, also welcomed UDDI. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) is a web-services registry and standard designed to make it easier for businesses to create partnerships and business models using web services. Bowstreet will enable the Business Web Factory 2 to use UDDI-registered services in creating business webs. The company will provide a set of parametric business web 'Builders' in the Business Web Factory that automate the interactions among UDDI registries and set up the service calls to the actual web services stored in the registries. Bowstreet's Builders will go beyond their current understanding of low-level element type definitions (SOAP and other 'web service plumbing' issues), to understanding categorizations, cross-service workflow issues, binding policies and other business-level processes - all critical in assembling business webs. Additionally, businessweb.com, a Bowstreet-sponsored online community, educational site and industry exchange for web services that goes online today, will include UDDI registries of web services as they become available. Access to businessweb.com is free of charge. Today, the Business Web Factory provides builders for constructing XML-based service calls to web services whose interfaces support SOAP and W3C Schema. Bowstreet customers don't have to know the intricacies of these XML standards in order to construct business webs that make use of this new breed of web services. With the development of UDDI and Bowstreet's planned set of UDDI Interaction Builders, customers will be able to take business web construction and maintenance to the next level of automation. UDDI will complement DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) - the directory services standard launched last year by Bowstreet, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and the Sun-Netscape Alliance - by encouraging the availability of an inventory of interoperable business-level web services to expedite e-commerce. DSML bridges the gap between directories and XML-based e-business applications, so that businesses can leverage their directory information in connecting multiple companies' business webs. DSML has already gained widespread support in the industry, with vendors such as IBM, Sun, Novell, iPlanet, Critical Path, Radiant Logic and InfoShark incorporating the standard into their e-business product lines. Bowstreet's Business Web Factory enables companies to dramatically accelerate B2B e-commerce using business webs, or collections of high-level web services that come together dynamically on the web to create new business models. This revolutionary approach of interconnecting companies in dynamic business webs is based on the Business Web Factory's foundation in Extensible Markup Language (XML), the lingua franca of Internet commerce, and on Bowstreet's dynamic automation technology, which enables companies to create mass-customized, high-level B2B and B2C web services using parametrically driven, dynamic assembly of core web services. The Bowstreet platform additionally enables companies to maintain their own directories of web services and to provide managed access to these web services through firewalls."

  • [September 21, 2000] "ObjectSpace Serves as Advisor on UDDI Specification to Speed Interoperability and Adoption of Web Services. Specification Validates ObjectSpace's Long-Held Position and Practice of Open Integration for Creating and Deploying Web Services." - "ObjectSpace, Inc., a leading provider of web service-enabled business-to-business integration, or B2Bi, software products and services, announced today the company has assumed an advisor role in the support and rollout of the UDDI (Universal Descriptions, Discovery and Integration) specification, announced last week by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba. ObjectSpace will also incorporate UDDI in its OpenBusiness software this year. As providers of web services-based B2B integration solutions, ObjectSpace has long recognized the need for a standard way to describe a business and how that business wants to interact with other businesses, as key in the next chapter of the Internet story. To provide this functionality, ObjectSpace delivered its OpenBusiness Portal module earlier this year, which allows businesses to publish, catalog and find web services. By bringing its real-world experience in building and deploying web services to the UDDI working groups, ObjectSpace can help ensure the specification delivers real world value to the market. UDDI is an initiative to create a global, platform-independent, open framework to enable businesses to 1) discover each other; 2) define how they will interact over the Internet; and 3) share information in a global registry that will rapidly accelerate the global adoption of B2B eCommerce. Until now, there has been no central way to easily get information about what standards different companies support and no single point of access to all markets of opportunity, allowing them to seamlessly connect with all possible partners. The UDDI specification leverages industry standards such as HTTP, XML and SOAP, further demonstrating the openness of the approach and the platform-independent commitment..."

  • [September 12, 2000] "XMLGlobal Technologies Inc. Joins the UDDI e-Commerce Standards Initiative." - "XMLGlobal Technologies, a provider of XML based e-business software solutions, today announced it has joined the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) project. The UDDI initiative is being developed through a collaboration of Ariba, IBM and Microsoft. As a member of the UDDI team XMLGlobal Technologies will participate in the development of a standard registry of services to help companies rapidly and efficiently extend their B2B marketplaces. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) is a web services registry and standard created to lower the barriers to entry and costs of doing business on the web. As businesses migrate directly to the internet they will register their various web-based applications such as procurement, supply chain and marketplace as services in UDDI, making it simpler for other businesses to discover and integrate with them. This will allow the many SMEs (small to medium enterprise) who are migrating to the internet, a standard way of being discovered and integrated into net marketplaces and online applications. At the same time the UDDI project will provide a forum for large corporations to improve their e-business initiatives with the rapidly growing number of online suppliers and customers. 'As a recognized provider of XML based e-business software solutions XMLGlobal Technologies will make significant contributions to the UDDI project,' said Peter Shandro, CEO of XMLGlobal Technologies. 'The fundamental conceptual thinking behind our flagship products, www.goxml.com, the world's premier context based XML search system, and ExpressXCHG, a patented native XML transformation software solution, has been a commitment to break down the technology and cost barriers preventing many companies from migrating to the internet. With the UDDI initiative and XMLGlobal's proven technology we believe we have a powerful end to end solution for the many companies looking to make the B2B move and participate in the fastest growing segment of the e-business market today.' In addition to its support for UDDI, XMLGlobal Technologies is actively involved with ebXML (the Electronic Business XML Initiative), a worldwide project to standardize the exchange of electronic business data. ebXML is sponsored by the UN/CEFACT and OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and is currently supported by hundreds of industry consortia, standards bodies and corporations from around the globe. Members of the Global Commerce Initiative (GCI) recently announced plans to use ebXML as the backbone of their new data exchange standard for business-to-business trade in the consumer goods industry. GCI members include 40 major manufacturers and retailers as well as eight trade associations, which in total represent 850,000 companies around the world."

  • [September 06, 2000] "Internet registry alliance forged. IBM, Microsoft, Ariba team up on business-to-business standards push." By Ashlee Vance. In InfoWorld (September 06, 2000). "Ariba, Microsoft, and IBM were joined on Wednesday by several key players in the e-commerce world to design a type of standardized electronic yellow pages that describes and categorizes companies throughout the world. While the trio of Ariba, Microsoft, and IBM currently lead the project's development, approximately 36 other vendors have agreed to act as advisors and developers of the technology. The trio of founding companies set a September target date for the availability of an Internet-based registry of companies using what they have called the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) standard. The UDDI standard should create a way for companies in the b-to-b marketplace to find out what types of commerce other companies conduct and what those companies use as their protocol for transactions and communications. Companies around the globe will be able to provide data and information for the registry at no charge. The first implementation slated for this month will contain basic categorization and service listings. Others versions of the registry are scheduled to appear in March 2001 and then December 2001, with more complex features added for varying types of b-to-b operations at each step. After 18 months, the project will move into the hands of a yet-unnamed standards body. At the moment, sources for the three companies said the UDDI system contains three types of information divided into what they refer to as white, yellow, and green pages, officials from the companies said here Wednesday at a press conference to launch the project. The white pages will contain business names, descriptions of the type of business, and other information regarding what kinds of services a vendor uses, and also what technology they can respond to. The yellow pages section adopts current government codes for tagging types of business operations as well as international and technology-based naming protocols. In addition, the yellow pages section arranges companies by geographical location. The green pages should provide more specific information on what types of documents a company can receive, the entry points for transactions, and the technology the company currently interacts with and supports. . . Ariba spearheaded the project and will offer resources, along with IBM and Microsoft, for the initial nodes, or data collection points, that will serve as the backbone for the system. Other vendors including American Express, Compaq Computer, SAP AG, Dell Computer, Nortel Networks, and Andersen Consulting will aid the development of the fledgling project, helping to work through the bugs of the proposed open standard. Over the next 18 months, the partners will try to expand the number of categories and add more complete features to help the complicated b-to-b transaction ladder. Suggestions include customizing the categorization features and accommodating the needs of large corporations with a variety of business units focused on different goals. In addition, a number of vendors expressed interest in building upon the standard as it progresses and developing registries with different features that lie on top of UDDI."

  • [November 13, 2000] "Canopy International Joins UDDI Advisory Counsel Formed by Microsoft, Ariba and IBM. Canopy to Provide B2B Integration and Industry Standards Expertise." - "Canopy International, an e-business service provider specializing in enterprise and business-to-business integration, today announced that it has joined the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project's advisory council. The UDDI is a cross-industry initiative designed to accelerate and broaden B2B integration and commerce on the Internet through the development of e-business transaction specifications and standards. Canopy joins IBM, Microsoft Corp., Ariba, and their coalition of business and technology leaders that recently launched UDDI. The UDDI Project is developing specifications and standards that will enable companies to find and transact business with each other quickly and easily. The goal of the UDDI Project is to offer the basic infrastructure for dynamic, automated integration of all e-commerce transactions and Web services. UDDI is defining a platform-neutral set of specifications to enable businesses to describe themselves and indicate their preferred means of conducting e-commerce transactions, and will also include the shared operation of a globally distributed UDDI Business Registry. As a member of UDDI's advisory council, Canopy will help develop standards and specifications, and provide the expertise they have gained from their long series of commitments to universal B2B e-commerce standards and from their history of developing standards-based integration solutions for industry leaders. Canopy recently demonstrated the use of UDDI for automatic alternative supplier identification at the November 2, 2000 B2B Vendor Challenge, which was sponsored by the Open Applications Group and hosted by Canopy. The UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) Project is a comprehensive, open industry initiative enabling businesses to (I) discover each other, and (II) define how they interact over the internet and share information in a global registry architecture. UDDI is the building block which will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact with one another via their preferred applications. UDDI is also a framework for Web services integration. It contains standards-based specifications for service description and discovery. The UDDI specification takes advantage of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), HTTP and Domain Name System (DNS) protocols. Additionally, cross platform programming features are addressed by adopting early versions of the proposed Simple Object Access ProtocoL (SOAP) messaging specifications found at the W3C Web site."

  • [September 07, 2000] "Ariba, IBM, Microsoft Outline Plans for B2B Standard." By Jeffrey Burt and Peter Galli. In eWEEK (September 07, 2000). "Thirty-six technology companies, led by Ariba Inc., IBM and Microsoft Corp., unveiled plans Wednesday to create a universal Internet standard designed to accelerate e-commerce. At a joint news conference here, officials with the three companies said developing such a standard was the only way to meet analysts' forecasts of more than $1 trillion dollars worth of business being conducted over the Internet by 2004. The initiative, dubbed the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration Project, is designed to create a platform-neutral standard based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) to fuel automated integration of all e-commerce transactions and Web services. At the heart of the project is a directory in which businesses can register themselves, the services they offer and their Internet capabilities. White, yellow and green pages: The UDDI Business Registry will include a white pages section that lists the names of the companies, a yellow pages section listing a company's standard codes and geographic information, and a green pages section categorizing the services offered by a particular company. The registry will not be limited to particular industries, and companies also can use it to find other businesses... 'The problem up to now has been that many businesses were unable to find and hook up with the right service providers,' said Stewart Allen, vice president of architecture and technology at San Francisco-based webMethods. 'This will make that possible. I believe it is possible to meet the 18-month timeframe to have globally acceptable standards for a common registry'."

  • [September 06, 2000] Lead by IBM, Ariba, and Microsoft, a broad coalition of business and technology leaders today announced the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project -- "a cross-industry initiative designed to accelerate and broaden business-to-business integration and commerce on the Internet. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard (registry) is a new industry initiative [which] creates a platform-independent, open framework for describing services, discovering businesses, and integrating business services using the Internet. It is designed as a building block that will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact business with one another using their preferred applications. UDDI is the first cross-industry effort driven by platform and software providers, marketplace operators and e-business leaders. These technology and business pioneers are acting as the initial catalysts to quickly develop the UDDI standard. The UDDI standard takes advantage of WorldWide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards such as Extensible Markup Languare (XML), and HTTP and Domain Name System (DNS) protocols. Additionally, cross platform programming features are addressed by adopting early versions of the proposed Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messaging specifications found at the W3C Web site. The UDDI standard is the building block that will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact with one another using their preferred applications. Some details of the architecture and its rationale are provided in the technical white paper: "The core component of the UDDI project is the UDDI business registration, an XML file used to describe a business entity and its Web Services. Conceptually, the information provided in a UDDI business registration consists of three components: 'white pages' including address, contact, and known identifiers; 'yellow pages' including industrial categorizations based on standard taxonomies; and 'green pages', the technical information about services that are exposed by the business. Green pages include references to specifications for Web Services, as well as support for pointers to various file and URL based discovery mechanisms if required. . . Even when one considers XML and SOAP, there are still vast gaps through which any two companies can fall in implementing a communications infrastructure. As any industry pundit will tell you: 'What is required is a full end-to-end solution, based on standards that are universally supported on every computing platform.' Clearly, there is more work to do to achieve this goal. The UDDI specifications borrow the lesson learned from XML and SOAP to define a next-layer-up that lets two companies share a way to query each other's capabilities and to describe their own capabilities. The core information model used by the UDDI registries is defined in an XML schema. XML was chosen because it offers a platform-neutral view of data and allows hierarchical relationships to be described in a natural way. The emerging XML schema standard was chosen because of its support for rich data types as well as its ability to easily describe and validate information based on information models represented in schemas. The UDDI XML Schema defines three core types of information that provide the kinds of information that a technical person would need to know in order to use a partners Web Services. These are: business information; service information, binding information; and information about specifications for services." Key specifications published to date include (1) UDDI Programmer's API Specification and (2) UDDI XML Structure Reference. The UDDI Programmer's API is a "programmatic interface provided for interacting with systems that follow the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UUDI) specifications make use of Extended Markup Language (XML) and a related technology called Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP), which is a specification for using XML in simple message based exchanges." The UDDI Programmers API Specification [XML Structure Reference] defines approximately 30 SOAP messages that are used to perform inquiry and publishing functions against any UDDI compliant service registry. This document outlines the details of each of the XML structures associated with these messages."

  • [September 06, 2000] "IBM, Microsoft, Ariba Team Up To Standardize XML. UDDI initiative to create company registry for B2B integration." By Elizabeth Montalbano. In CRN (September 06, 2000). "The race to create XML standards for B2B exchanges just got hotter. IBM, Microsoft and Ariba on Wednesday unveiled the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project, an initiative designed to create a standard registry for companies that will accelerate the integration of systems in the B2B marketplace. XML, a standard, tag-based language used for data exchange, is at the core of UDDI and increasingly is being used in B2B technology because it makes it easier to transfer data between disparate systems. IBM, Sun and other partners in the UDDI initiative also are working in other groups, most notably OASIS and its ebXML initiative, that attempt to standardize how XML is used in B2B integration. The aim of UDDI is to standardize how companies can interface with one another using XML, said Paul Maritz, group vice president of the platform group for Microsoft, at a press conference here. UDDI will do this by storing information about companies' B2B capabilities in a shared directory that companies can access via a set of XML standards the three vendors are working to produce in tandem with UDDI partners, said Maritz. 'Businesses then will use these standards and conventions to register their business in a directory that stores their names and the services they can offer,' says Maritz. The registry will consist of three sections, he said. The first is a 'white pages' directory that will allow companies to register their names and the key services they provide, and allows other companies to search the directory by company name, said Maritz. The second is a 'yellow pages' directory that categorizes companies in three ways: by NAICS industry standard codes set by the U.S. government, by United Nations/SPSC codes and by geographical company information. The last element of UDDI is a 'green pages' directory, where companies will be able to interface with companies in the registry using XML because they can find out what format the companies support, and then can send documents based on that XML format, said Maritz. [. . .] Now that vendors are agreeing on how to develop a standardized XML-based B2B registry, it remains to be seen whether it will actually work."

  • [September 05, 2000] "Commentary: Microsoft, IBM, Ariba to create major advance in B2B." By [CNET News.com Staff]. In CNet News.com (September 01 2000). "IBM, Microsoft and Ariba will propose a set of XML-based interface and procedure standards necessary to maintain an online database that will enable companies to divulge and discover the online business standards required to streamline commerce and procedure to bring companies to the Net. Although the directory will contain some human-readable information, it will primarily support the system-to-system (S2S) domain. XML provides a vehicle for creating S2S interfaces for Internet-based communication. As such, it has been called the next generation of electronic data interchange (EDI). However, like EDI it is language-oriented. Companies and industries need to develop the consistent interface formats necessary to conduct actual S2S, market-style transactions. Each industry, product type, market and customer type has unique needs that must be accommodated. The major challenge for trading partners has always been to establish and publish those interfaces. This new proposal the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard, is designed to provide a way for a company's computers to consistently publish and subscribe to information pertinent to participation in business-to-business e-commerce and Net market systems. Commerce systems of actual and potential business partners can search, discover and download the basic UDDI constructs automatically, dramatically reducing programming complexity. This provides those business partners with the information they need to conduct basic transactions, such as submitting bids and sending invoices S2S. One of the most important aspects of this project is that these companies intend their approach to become a published standard. While competitors to UDDI may appear, and more than one may ultimately be used, no one will be able to establish a proprietary solution that allows one company to own this important part of e-commerce. The combination of Microsoft and IBM, the two largest companies in the computer industry, with Ariba, which has taken a leadership role in business-to-business commerce on the Web, makes this a powerful move in the industry and guarantees that proprietary solutions will fail. . . The UDDI initiative also promises to help reduce costs for business-to-business e-commerce technology to a reasonable level. EDI and XML have always been very expensive to implement. Companies have had to buy millions of dollars in software and spend large amounts of staff time on the detailed technical problems of creating their interfaces."

  • [September 06, 2000] "IBM, Microsoft, Ariba Team for Web Business Standard." By Nicole Volpe. In Reuters News (September 05, 2000). "International Business Machines Corp., Microsoft Corp., and Ariba Inc. said on Tuesday they have teamed up to create a directory which aims to become the standard way for businesses to find and connect with partners on the Web. The three companies said they planned to have a framework for the directory available on Thursday, listing the basic contact information for businesses by industry, along the same lines as yellow pages listings. A test registry with more detailed information about each company's electronic-commerce abilities and practices was expected to be up and running within 30 days. The proposed standard is called Universal Description Discovery and Integration and is based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), a Web standard for data exchange which is already widely used for online business... Executives from the three companies said the registry could eliminate current problems caused by companies having to call and e-mail each other to see how to connect, for example, their accounting or their order fulfillment systems. The registry would allow companies to know in advance what software to use to carry out a transaction, eliminating the need for technicians to spend time collaborating, as they often do now. The companies said they expected the registry, which would update all corporate listings as changes occurred within industries, also to bring a new era of automated transactions. James [Utzschneider] said with the use of the new registry he expected such seamless, automatic transactions to take place within a year. Twenty-nine other companies have signed up for the registry so far, executives said."

  • [September 06, 2000] "Riding the XML Bus to E-business Heaven. Microsoft, IBM Put Aside Rivalry to Concur on Internet Standards." By Chris Preimesberger. From DevX (September 06, 2000). ['Who would have imagined that dyed-in-the-wool Web-services enemies Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems would be joining hands around the XML campfire and singing its praises -- for the good of the connected world? These reluctant partners are seeing eye-to-eye, at least as it pertains to their new XML-based online business registry.'] "Bitter rivals Microsoft Corp., IBM, and Sun Microsystems, as well as 33 other companies, have boarded the same Internet bus, venturing on the road they believe leads to e-business heaven. And there at the wheel, tipping a cap and grinning ear-to-ear, is the driver: XML. These heavy hitters put differences behind them Wednesday to announce they have joined forces in the creation of a new entity called UDDI (for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration standard). The UDDI is not a technology but a consortium, the main product of which its founders liken to a 'yellow pages' for Internet business. The goal is to create a platform-independent database of businesses. Companies register for inclusion in the database and can then use it for purposes of describing business services, discovering business partners and integrating business services using the Internet. The UDDI database depends heavily on one ingredient: Extensible Markup Language, which will be the foundation on which it is built. If not for that X-factor in the database, these 36 companies probably wouldn't be coming along for the ride. In fact, if the UDDI works as company officials think it will, XML will stand alone as the universal catalyst for business-to-business and business-to-customer commerce. '[UDDI] happened because at high levels in each of these companies we came to separate agreement about one thing: We must have universal standards for doing business over the Internet,' said Microsoft vice-president Paul Maritz. 'XML is already a universal standard, and it works very well.' There is an underlying message for developers of all levels: If you're not already implementing XML for back end data exchange, it would behoove you get with it if you want to develop apps to be used on the Web. But proficiency in XML won't be a prerequisite for success -- at least at first..."

  • [September 06, 2000] "Group develops XML-based yellow pages. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT.]" By John Geralds. In vnunet.com (September 06, 2000). "Ariba, IBM and Microsoft have teamed up to provide an online database of companies that want to conduct business on the web. The three software providers plan to make a framework available this week for listing the basic contact information for businesses by industry, similar to a yellow pages listing. The framework is called Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and is based on XML (extensible markup language), a web standard for data exchange. Under the proposal, each business would have its own UDDI address that would contain information such as what the business provides and how to connect to it. The initiative will allow businesses to register on a central database by providing corporate information such as company contact details, industry category and services or products. For example, it would allow a company to automate the integration of a business-to-business transaction. John Mann, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group, said that UDDI lets a company find out how its computers can talk to another company's computers. Ariba, IBM and Microsoft said they had another 30 or so hi-tech firms that will use trial versions of the protocol starting at the end of the month. Partners are expected to be announced Wednesday, and there are plans to turn the framework over to one of the internet standards bodies in 12 to 18 months."

  • "Plan Aims to Foster Electronic Commerce Between Businesses. More Direct Computer-to-Computer Deals Expected." By John Markoff. In New York Times (September 05, 2000). "Seeking to promote the rapid development of electronic commerce between businesses, I.B.M., Microsoft and Ariba plan to announce a proposal on Wednesday to create a huge set of online registries of products and services to help automate business transcations. Twenty-nine companies, including American Express, CommerceOne, Compaq, Merrill Lynch and Sun Microsystems, will initially endorse the proposal, to be named the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration project, or UDDI. The backers said they planned to turn the idea over eventually to one of several Internet standards bodies to make it a broadly backed initiative. . . The initiative comes at a time when companies have begun to grapple with the intricacies of electronic commerce, hoping to achieve the original promise of a new Internet publishing standard known as Extensible Markup Language, or XML. Until recently, the UDDI project was a closely held secret among the three companies. While I.B.M. and Microsoft are dominant players in Internet commerce, Ariba is a smaller electronic commerce company, based in Mountain View, Calif. Although the initiative is being portrayed as an effort to create an "open" standard, the UDDI project offers some insight into the bruising behind-the-scenes competition taking place in the world of Internet standards as companies seek proprietary advantage for new technologies..."

  • "Idustry Leaders Join to Accelerate Business Integration and Commerce on the Internet 36 Companies Cooperate to Further the Growth of Internet Commerce via Standards for Web Services." Ariba Press release.

  • UDDI Teleconference Replay Webcast - Cited by Ariba.
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