Introduction to UDDI:

Important Features and Functional Concepts

October 2004

Organization for the Advancement of

Structured Information Standards
www.oasis-open.org
 Introduction to UDDI
Important Features and Functional Concepts

TABLE OF CONTENTS

OVERVIEW...................................................................................................................4

TYPICAL APPLICATIONS OF A UDDI REGISTRY................................................ 4

A BRIEF HISTORY OF UDDI.................................................................................... 4

KEY FUNCTIONAL CONCEPTS IN THE UDDI SPECIFICATION.......................6

The UDDI Data Model
Defining UDDI Nodes, Registries, and Affiliated Registries
Essential Programmatic Interfaces in UDDI

UDDI VERSION 3: A FOCUS ON PRIVATE REGISTRIES AND

REGISTRY AFFILIATION.......................................................................................... 9
A Closer Look at Registry Affiliation

HOW TO LEARN MORE............................................................................................ 11

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Introduction to UDDI
Important Features and Functional Concepts

OVERVIEW
The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration () protocol is a central
element of the group of related standards that comprise the Web services stack. The
 specification defines a standard method for publishing and discovering the
network-based software components of a service-oriented architecture (). Its
development is led by the  consortium of enterprise software vendors and
customers.

This paper provides a concise overview of the  standard and highlights
significant architectural changes in the recent Version 3 specification. In a
companion white paper, we describe business scenarios that  and related Web
services infrastructure are well suited to help address.

TYPICAL APPLICATIONS OF A UDDI REGISTRY

A  registry’s functional purpose is the representation of data and metadata about
Web services. A registry, either for use on a public network or within an
organization’s internal infrastructure, offers a standards-based mechanism to classify,
catalog, and manage Web services, so that they can be discovered and consumed by
other applications. As part of a generalized strategy of indirection among services-
based applications,  offers several benefits to IT managers at both design-time
and run-time, including increasing code re-use and improving infrastructure
management by:

■ Publishing information about Web services and categorization rules specific to an

organization
■ Finding Web services (within an organization or across organizational
boundaries) that meet given criteria
■ Determining the security and transport protocols supported by a given Web
service and the parameters necessary to invoke the service
■ Providing a means to insulate applications (and providing fail-over and intelligent
routing) from failures or changes in invoked services

A BRIEF HISTORY OF UDDI

When  first was conceived, much of the attention was focused on the “

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Introduction to UDDI
Important Features and Functional Concepts

Business Registry” (), a public implementation of the  standard that

represented a master directory of publicly available e-commerce services. In many
ways, this public registry can be considered analogous to the root node of the 
database, another successful example of a distributed registry infrastructure.

Although the  remains an important part of the  project, it represents only
one aspect of the overall effort. Just as the overwhelming majority of  activity
occurs within the confines of a company’s own network, so too do most 
implementations support a business’ own Web services infrastructure.

This understanding is reflected as the  specification has evolved to reflect the
need for federated control in real-world operational requirements, as well as to
further integrate the standard with other elements of service-oriented infrastructure.
Highlights of the standard’s progress are shown in the table below.

Figure 1: History of the UDDI Specification

UDDI VERSION YEAR RELEASED KEY OBJECTIVE

Create foundation for registry of Internet-

1.0 2000
based business services
Align specification with emerging Web
services standards and provide flexible
2.0 2001
service taxonomy. Formally released
under  aegis in 2003
Support secure interaction of private and
public implementations as major
3.0 2004 element of service-oriented
infrastructure. To be released by  in
late 2004

The current 3.0 specification represents a significant milestone in ’s evolution.

Its feature definitions are stable and backwards-compatible with earlier versions of
the standard. In fact, a prerequisite of its certification by   standards group
was the existence of several working commercial implementations. We examine
major functional features of  in more detail, below.

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 Introduction to UDDI
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KEY FUNCTIONAL CONCEPTS IN THE UDDI SPECIFICATION

 describes a registry of Web services and programmatic interfaces for
publishing, retrieving, and managing information about services described therein.
In fact,  itself is of set a Web services! The  specification defines services
that support the description and discovery of (1) businesses, organizations, and other
Web services providers, (2) the Web services they make available, and (3) the technical
interfaces which may be used to access and manage those services.  is based
upon several other established industry standards, including , ,  Schema
(), , and .

In this paper, we will highlight several important technical characteristics of an 

registry, but this introductory discussion necessarily is neither exhaustive nor
definitive. The official  specification formally describes the Web services, data
structures, and behaviors of a registry that complies with the  standard.*

The UDDI Data Model

The core information model used by a  registry is defined in several 
schemas.  was chosen because it offers a platform-neutral view of data and allows
hierarchical relationships to be described in a natural way.  was chosen because of
its support for rich data types and its ability to easily describe and validate
information based on information models represented in schemas.

The  s define several core types of information that provide the kinds of
information that that users and applications would need to know in order to use a
particular Web service. Together, these form a base information model and
interaction framework of  registries. They are:

■ A description of a service’s business function (called the businessService)

■ Information about the organization that published the service (businessEntity),
■ The service’s technical details (bindingTemplate), including a reference to the
service’s programmatic interface or , and
■ Various other attributes or metadata such as taxonomy, transports, digital

* The official  specification can be found online at http://www.uddi.org/specification.html. Several

technical notes and best practices documents also are available on this web site.

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signatures, etc. (tModels).

Figure 2: UDDI’s Core Data Types

 versions 2 and 3 each add an additional data type to facilitate registry affiliation.
Respectively, these are:

■ Relationships among entities in the registry (publisherAssertion) and

■ Standing requests to track changes to a list of entities (subscription).

These, like all  data types, are expressed in  and are stored persistently by a
 registry. Within a  registry, each core data structure is assigned a unique
identifier according to a standard scheme. This identifier is referred to as a  key.

Taxonomic Classification of UDDI Entities

An important part of  is providing a foundation and best practices that help
provide semantic structure to the information about Web services contained in a
registry.  allows users to define multiple taxonomies that can be used in a
registry. In such a way, users are not tied to a single system, but can rather employ an
unlimited number of appropriate classification systems simultaneously.  also
defines a consistent way for a publisher to add new classification schemes to their
registrations.

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Defining UDDI Nodes, Registries, and Affiliated Registries

The  specification includes a specific definition of the hierarchical relationship
between a single instance of a  implementation and others to which it is related.
Technically, there are three major classifications of  servers:

■ A node is a  server that supports at least the minimum set of functionality
defined in the specification. It may perform one or more functions on the 
data to which it has access. It is a member of exactly one  registry.

■ A registry is composed of one or more nodes. A registry performs the complete set
of functionality as defined in the specification.

■ Affiliated Registries are individual  registries that implement policy-based

sharing of information among them. The affiliated registries share a common
namespace for  keys that uniquely identify data records.

Essential Programmatic Interfaces in UDDI

Although describing ’s application programming interfaces (s) is well beyond
the scope of this paper, it is worth noting several features that support the concepts
described above.

■ Publishing information about a service to a registry

■ Searching a  registry for information about a service

These inquiry and publishing functions represent the core data management tools of
a  registry. Additionally, we have described how multiple registries may form a
group, known as an affiliation, to permit policy-based copying of core data structures
among them. Some of the most important concepts that support registry interaction
include:

■ Replicating and transferring custody of data about a service

■ Registration key generation and management
■ Registration subscription  set
■ Security and authorization

The  specification divides these functions into “Node  Sets” that are

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 Introduction to UDDI
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supported by a  server and “Client  Sets” that are supported (naturally
enough) by a  client.

UDDI VERSION 3: A FOCUS ON PRIVATE REGISTRIES AND REGISTRY

AFFILIATION
Although many aspects throughout the  specification have matured in the
version 3 release,* the chief architectural change is the concept of “registry affiliation.”
This shift reflects the increasing recognition that  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.

Figure 3: Several “Flavors” of UDDI Registries

EXAMPLE
REGISTRY TYPE DESCRIPTION
APPLICATION
An internal registry, behind a firewall, that is
isolated from the public network. Access to
Enterprise Web
Corporate/Private both administrative features and registry
Service Registry
data is restricted. Data is not shared with
other registries.
A registry deployed within a controlled
environment, but with limited access by
authorized clients. Administrative features Trading Partner
Affiliated
may be delegated to trusted parties. Data Network
may be shared with other registries in a
controlled manner.
From an end-user’s perspective, a public
registry appears to be a service in a cloud.
Although administrative functions may be
secured, access to the registry data itself is  Business
Public
essentially open and public. Data may be Registry ()
shared or transferred among other
registries, and content may or may not be
moderated.

* An inclusive list of major new features in UDDI version 3 is available on the UDDI web site at
http://www.uddi.org/pubs/uddi_v3_features.htm.

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Introduction to UDDI
Important Features and Functional Concepts

For , businesses’ increasing focus on service-oriented architecture has led to a

strong ongoing emphasis to support a variety of infrastructural permutations and to
provide a means to define the relationships among a variety of  registries.
Although the  specification from the start included concepts like delegation and
distribution among server peers, earlier definitions of the standard relied upon
various proprietary means of interaction. By contrast, the current version provides an
open, standardized approach to ensure widely interoperable communication.

While the specification enables a technical interoperability of registries, it does not

dictate the nature of or policies for such interaction. Rather, it leaves those issues to
be decided upon by the registry operators. Obviously, the establishment of these
policies, as well as a  key management infrastructure, will become a critical
element to successful distribution of registry responsibilities on not just a technical
level, but also on a business process plane.

A Closer Look at Registry Affiliation

It is worth examining what is meant by the concept of registry affiliation in the 
specification. Simply put, affiliation refers to using  to support a variety of
network/infrastructure topologies. The possibilities have expanded from a stand-
alone, single-registry approach to include hierarchical, peer-based, delegated, and
others. In short, the structure of a  registry (or registries) can now reflect the
realities and relationships of the underlying business processes that it supports.

Managing multiple versions of registry entries presents a challenge, but it is a critical

aspect of managing this sort of distributed infrastructure. The standard itself provides
guidance to help facilitate the maintenance and mapping of  keys and records
across registries, but the specification is intended to do just that—facilitate, but not
define, a wide range of business scenarios. It will be the registry operators, users, and
software developers who design and implement a wide range of business policies and
constructs on top of the basic  infrastructure.

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Figure 4: Conceptual Illustration of Registry Affiliation

Comment: This diagram illustrates several models of registry interaction enabled by Version 3 of the
 specification. Through mechanisms like publish/subscribe and replication among peer nodes of a
registry, the information in  servers can be fully public (like the ), semi-private (such as the
affiliated registries shown here), or even fully private and isolated from the public network (as depicted
in the “Private Domain” above).

HOW TO LEARN MORE

The  specification is managed by , a member-led, international, non-profit
standards consortium that concentrates on structured information and e-business
standards. The organization’s members include enterprise  users, vendors,
academics, governments, trade associations, and individuals. In addition to ,
 is known best for shepherding Web services-related protocols such as ,
, -Security, , and others.

To learn more about  and , please visit www.uddi.org. In addition to the
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Important Features and Functional Concepts

specification itself, the  Web site provides detailed technical notes, best practices,
case studies, and information about how to contribute to ’s ongoing
development. The site also provides links to several commercial and open-source
implementations of  registries that are available in the marketplace. Information
about  is available on www.oasis-open.org, and the work of the  
Specification Technical Committee can be found at
www.oasis-open.org/committees/uddi-spec.

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