UDDI

7 November 2001

Overview of Universal Description, Discovery andIntegration


A brief introduction to UDDI

UDDI
IBMAlphaworks
IBMDeveloperworks
IBMServices
WSDL
StencilGroup

What is UDDI?

The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) project isan effort by several major industry players to create a common protocolfor interacting with a wide range of companies and non-corporateentities. At it's core, UDDI is a combination of an XML schema and adirectory service. The directory service component is a centralbusiness registry which serves as a search engine that interfaces withthe XML doc. The XML doc contains descriptors for the businessinformation (name, location, etc), the services that business offersonline, and technical details of how to interact with the services.

That's all neat-o, but so what?

UDDI is the business complement to technologies such as XML-RPC andSOAP. It allows a company to discover and interact with new partnersand to work more efficiently with existing partners. There are alreadythousands of services that can be transacted over a network (be it theinternet, an intranet, or an extranet). UDDI is an attempt to codifythose services and help companies describe them to potentialclients/partners as well as to help companies find out what's availableand where.

How?

UDDI creates a framework for describing any sort of service(peer-to-peer file sharing, http, ftp, IM, accounting, financialquotes, pizza delivery, etc). The registry component provides a form ofyellow pages, in which one can search for businesses offering a givenservice that meet certain criteria (location, price range, businessname, etc). Once located, the user can view their UDDI doc anddetermine exactly what services they offer and see how they will beable to interface with those services. In the case of existing businesspartners, it will dramatically speed the process of determining how tointeract with the Accounts Payable system, for example.

Details, man, I need details

The Schema: Business Info, Service Info, Binding Info/Specs. Like this.

  1. The businessEntity element of theschema contains, as noted before, the basics such as business name,address, phone number. Nothing thrilling, but necessary nonetheless.
  2. Service Info contains descriptors ofthe services offered grouped by business process (shipping, purchasing,etc) with additional delimiters such as industry, geographicboundaries, etc. It also contains some basic technical info on eachservice (what is the URL, support options, routing info, etc)
  3. bindingTemplate describes how toactually connect to a service (format, protocol, security, responseinfo, etc). This is the complex part, natch.


Example

Your company currently is in need of market analysis service, and youhave an established business relationship with Nu-Perfect America.Rather than calling a sales rep and having a half dozencalls/emails/etc go back and forth trying to figure out if they canprovide the specific type of analysis you want and what you need to doto interface with them, you fire up your browser and search forNu-Perfect America + Widget Trend Analysis. It promptly shows you thatthey do indeed do what you want, and it provides you with the APIinformation you need to interact with the system. As you already are aclient of theirs, you simply pass on the technical info to yourdevelopers, who are able to talk to Nu-Perfects software quickly andeasily.