Universal Description Discovery and Integration

Web services discovery provides access to software systems over the Internet using standard protocols. In the most basic scenario there is a Web Service Provider that publishes a service and a Web Service Consumer that uses this service. Web Service Discovery is the process of finding suitable web services for a given task.

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) is an XML-based registry for business internet services.

Publishing a Web service involves creating a software artifact and making it accessible to potential consumers. Web Service Providers augment a Web service endpoint with an interface description using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) so that a consumer can use the service.

Optionally, a provider can explicitly register a service with a Web Services Registry such as Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) or publish additional documents intended to facilitate discovery such as Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL) documents. The service users or consumers can search Web Services manually or automatically. The implementation of UDDI servers and WSIL engines should provide simple search APIs or web-based GUI to help find Web services.

Web services may also be discovered using multicast mechanisms like WS-Discovery, thus reducing the need for centralized registries in smaller networks.

The current UDDI search mechanism can only focus on a single search criterion, such as business name, business location, business category, service type by name, business identifier, or discovery URL. In fact, in a business solution, it is very normal to search multiple UDDI registries or WSIL documents and then aggregate the returned result by using filtering and ranking techniques. IBM modularized this federated Web Services Discovery engine in 2001. The released technology from IBM is Business Explorer for Web Services (BE4WS).

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

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