Overview

UDDI is in effect the publicity arm for Web services. It satisfies the self-advertising mandate of Web services. It is a standardized process to publish and discover information about Web services (as well as other services) programmatically or via a graphical user interface, which would typically be Web based. OASIS, which took over the stewardship for this technology as of July 2002, has a subheading in the UDDI.org section of its Web site that states: Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration of Web Services. Appending the two crucial words Web services to UDDI makes the goal of UDDI that much easier to perceive and appreciate.

A banner on that same OASIS Web page succinctly and elegantly highlights what UDDI is all about by saying: UDDI is a key building block enabling enterprises to quickly and dynamically discover and invoke Web Services both internally and externally. UDDI as such is a universal, totally open, platform-independent mechanism for describing, discovering, and integrating (i.e., consuming) Web services, though it can also be used to describe and advertise non-Web services related services (e.g., the 1-800 toll-free, mail-order telephone number for a traditional brick-and-mortar business).

The mission of UDDI is to provide a standard, uniform service, readily accessible by applications via a programmatic interface or by people via a GUI, for describing and locating the following:

• Business and organizations that offer various services Web services being...