Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is the registry standard from the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and is well supported by IBM, Microsoft and others. The intent is that it should be used to register web services and, as its name implies, the registration will create a standard description, which will enable services to be discovered and then integrated together. There is no doubt that such a service is necessary to support a System Orientated Architecture (SOA) and early implementations have used UDDI to good effect.
The problem is that the standard does not appear to be sufficiently broad to support the management and governance of the full range of artefacts needed to implement SOA. This is the argument put forward by the ebXML (electronic business using eXtensible Markup Language) technical committee, which has developed a series of OASIS standards.
The initial concern of the ebXML committee was defining standard message formats for electronic business (for example defining the standard parts of an invoice). As part of this standards effort it was obvious that the different artefacts needed to be registered; that is, there needed to be a place where you could discover that an invoice had been defined. But registration alone was not enough, it was also necessary to have somewhere to store the definition – commonly known as a repository. The committee recognised that if the whole lifecycle of an artefact was to be managed then the registry and the repository had to be joined at the hip. If they were not, it would be possible for a change to an artefact (for example, the addition of new field types in the invoice) to be implemented without the registry being aware.
