Amit Mathew

CSCI 8351

1/15/03

A Brief Look at UDDI (IBM)

OVERVIEW

            UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) is the modern equivalent of the Yellow Pages, allowing businesses to find and use web services via a programmatic interface.  UDDI is the result of the mix of modern technical and business needs and is designed to solve real world problems.  Although many envisioned a single all-encompassing UDDI Business Registry (UBR), various companies (predictably) created their own UBRs. I chose to sample IBM’s implementation which is available at https://uddi.ibm.com/ubr/ and specifically, the test registry, located at http://uddi.ibm.com/testregistry/registry.html.  The test registry provides a sandbox to test UDDI capabilities without affecting current business processes.

GETTING STARTED

            After a relatively painless registration process, I was ushered to the main page of IBM’s test UBR.  The first thing I noticed was that IBM keeps track of three categories: Businesses, Business Relationships, and Technical Models (t-models).  These categories are personalized and reflect the services your business offers and thus are under the Publish action.  The other action is Find, where you can search for web services offered by other businesses.  It quickly becomes evident that the online registry is merely a web view of the underlying services that you would normally access programmatically.  Nonetheless, the web view is a convenient method for quickly finding what types of services are available in the UBR.

PUBLISH

            The interface for adding Businesses, Business Relationships, and t-models seemed fairly straightforward, but I didn’t actually add any information.  Adding a Business merely requires that you provide the name of the business.  Adding a Business Relationship is more involved and the IBM UBR provides three types of business Relationships: parent-child, peer-peer, and identity.  Adding a t-model requires that you provide the t-model’s name, description, overview URL, and its Locator.

FIND

To find a web service, IBM provides a simple and advanced search.  The simple search allows you to search for a business, service, or t-model, and uses the name, category, or locator values as search criteria.  The category includes several taxonomies including WAND and NAICS (North American Industry Classification System).  The advanced search allows you to search by category and includes more specific search criteria.  I did a test search for a t-model with a name "car" in the NAICS taxonomy system.  There were several results and I chose to find more details about a Car Rental standard.  The t-model information included a key, a description, an overview URL (that points to the .wsdl file), and the locator information.

CONCLUSION

            The IBM UBR provides an accessible interface to publish and view web services by utilizing a web interface to the UDDI data.  Although the only way to fully understand the underlying details is to access the registry via a web service, the online version presents a comprehensible overview.