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UDDI: an industry initiative

The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) project is originally an industry initiative. UDDI is the first truly cross-industry effort driven by all major platform and software providers, marketplace operators and e-business leaders. In July 2002, the UDDI Community was counting over 250 companies that have agreed to support the development of the UDDI standard.

The UDDI project creates a framework for describing services, discovering businesses, and integrating business services using the Internet. It has been developed as a platform-independent and open framework taking advantage of widely accepted standards such as HTTP, XML and SOAP.

As a part of the UDDI project, the UDDI Business Registry (UBR) has been established to allow businesses to publish and discover Web services on the Web. These UDDI Registries are run by Microsoft, IBM, SAP and NTT Communications and are replicated over each other. UDDI Registries have also gained ground on the intranet to support the various corporate or external services used by companies.

UDDI: an OASIS project

In July 2002, the UDDI project 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. Under the OASIS umbrella, UDDI is expected to gain recognition as a de facto Internet standard for the publication and discovery of Web services implementations both within and between enterprises.