UDDI 2.0 Provides Ties That Bind

With one versions worth of experience under its belt, the UDDI design team has gained valuable insight into the things it missed in UDDI 1.0.

"Many larger corporations and virtual businesses such as marketplaces and trade blocks had commented that [Universal Description, Discovery and Integration] Version 1.0 was not adequate for registration of complex business information," states the UDDI Version 2.0 Programmers API Specification (available at www.uddi.org/pubs/ProgrammersAPI-V2.00-Open-20010608.pdf).

The UDDI 2.0 specification, which was released last June, makes two major changes over UDDI 1.0.

First, Version 2.0 provides a way for multiple entities (multiple UDDI BusinessEntity objects) in a UDDI directory to link themselves in a hierarchy or in a horizontal, point-to-point chain. This is especially important for large organizations with many divisions or subsidiaries that will register themselves in a UDDI directory.

Using these links (called PublisherAssertions), separate divisions can group themselves under a master corporate registration to show corporate affiliation and avoid duplicating shared information.

These PublisherAssertions could also be used to create horizontal links (in a chain or star topology) to indicate business partnership relationships or membership in a trade association.

To prevent false claims, all links have to be verified by parties on both sides of the link before the link becomes visible in the directory. The exception is if the same agent creates both registrations.

Second, UDDI 2.0 adds a mechanism for those querying a UDDI directory to verify that the statements an organization makes about itself are true. Claims about categorization (the type of industry a business is in, using standardized industry taxonomies) or identity (any unique identifiers, such as a Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S number) can now be defined as checked taxonomies.

UDDI 2.0 directories pass information in checked taxonomies through a verification process (left unspecified by the standard) before allowing the entries to be registered.

Four organizations—Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Microsoft Corp. and SAP AG—are hosting beta implementations of public UDDI directories based on UDDI 2.0. As the uddi.org site warns, these registries are for testing and prototyping UDDI 2.0 only, and data stored in them may be lost at any time. IBM and Microsoft continue to maintain production-status UDDI 1.0 registries.

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Directories Ready for Testing

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