Universal Description Discovery and Integration

UDDI is an acronym for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, a platform-independent, XML-based registry for businesses worldwide to list themselves on the Internet. UDDI is an open industry initiative, sponsored by OASIS, enabling businesses to publish service listings and discover each other and define how the services or software applications interact over the Internet. A UDDI business registration consists of three components:  

White Pages - address, contact, and known identifiers;

Yellow Pages - industrial categorizations based on standard taxonomies; and

Green Pages - technical information about services exposed by the business.

UDDI is one of the core Web Services standards. It is designed to be interrogated by SOAP messages and to provide access to Web Services Description Language documents describing the protocol bindings and message formats required to interact with the web services listed in its directory.

UDDI was written in August, 2000, at a time when the authors had a vision of a world in which consumers of Web Services would be linked up with providers through a public or private dynamic brokerage system. In this vision, anyone needing a service such as credit card authentication, would go to their service broker and select one supporting the desired SOAP or other service interface and meeting other criteria. In such a world, the publicly operated UDDI node or broker would be critical for everyone. For the consumer, public or open brokers would only return services listed for public discovery by others, while for a service producer, getting a good placement, by relying on metadata of authoritative index categories, in the brokerage would be critical for effective placement.

The UDDI specifications supported a publicly accessible Universal Business Registry in which a naming system was built around the UDDI-driven service broker. Some assert that the most common place that a UDDI system can be found is inside a company where it is used to dynamically bind client systems to implementations. They would say that much of the search metadata permitted in UDDI is not used for this relatively simple role. However, the core of the trade infrastructure under UDDI, when deployed in the Universal Business Registries (now being disabled), has made all the information available to any client application, regardless of heterogeneous computing domains.