News
UDDI control shifts to OASIS
- By John K. Waters
- August 5, 2002
The future of one of the key building blocks of Web services applications has
been placed in the hands of an international standards body. Last week, it was
disclosed that control of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration
(UDDI) specification, formerly the focus of the industry group, UDDI.org, has
shifted to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards (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, according to UDDI.org documents. OASIS will manage the further
development of the UDDI specification and all related activities, the group
said, adding that existing business registries will continue to be made
available by registry operators.
OASIS, a not-for-profit organization formed to promote public information
standards like XML, SGML and CGM, oversees the development of worldwide
standards for security, Web services, XML conformance, business transactions,
electronic publishing, topic maps, and interoperability within and between
marketplaces. OASIS lists more than 400 corporate and individual members in 100
countries.
A registry and services discovery specification, UDDI has emerged as a key
piece of the Web services software stack, along with SOAP and WSDL. Led by
Ariba, IBM, Microsoft and others, the UDDI project is designed to enable
software to automatically discover and integrate with services on the Web. UDDI
''catalog'' contains white pages (addresses and contacts), yellow pages
(industry classification) and green pages (description of services). The green
pages include the XML version, type of encryption and a Document Type Definition
(DTD) of the standard. UDDI messages ride on top of the SOAP protocol, which
invokes services on the Web.
Chris Kurt, general program manager of UDDI.org, said the UDDI spec will
continue to advance as a standard under OASIS, 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, he said.
At the same time, UDDI.org unveiled a Version 3 specification, which Kurt
said 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,' Kurt said. '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.'
UDDI V3 enhancements include increased security features, improved Web
Services Description Language (WSDL) support, multi-registry topologies and new
subscription API and core information model advances.
About the Author
John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Silicon Valley. He can be reached
at [email protected].