UDDI.org To Become OASIS Member

UDDI.org OASIS

Officials said OASIS will publish the third version of the UDDI specification next week and that all further developments of the specifications will fall under OASIS' jurisdiction.

Currently, Microsoft, IBM and Hewlett-Packard offer UDDI registries, and SAP and NTT Docomo have registries in development.

It has not yet been decided whether the registries also will fall under OASIS' control, said Chris Kurt, program manager for UDDI.org and a Microsoft official.

OASIS taking the reins of the UDDI technology should give the industry assurance that UDDI is here to stay, Kurt said.

"This should raise people's consciousness that this is stable work and they should have the confidence going forward" in adopting UDDI, Kurt said.

The next step for UDDI 3.0 will be for OASIS members to form a technical committee charter around the technology, said Patrick Gannon, CEO and president of OASIS. Once that is passed, the first committee meeting will happen within 45 days, he said.

Another Web services standard in OASIS, ebXML, also features a standard registry for Web services. Gannon said UDDI's inclusion in OASIS will not affect that work.

"There have been a number of pilot activities where people have implemented both in complementary fashion," Gannon said. "We will rely on members for appropriate guidance for how they [exist together."

UDDI.org was first launched as a joint initiative by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba in September 2000 to provide a standard way to identify trading partners' Web services. The group recently submitted its third version for review.

Since UDDI's inception, a wide array of companies--including Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems--have built and sold products that support UDDI. It is one of several XML-based standards for Web services, including WSDL and SOAP, that solution providers say will be key to the broad adoption of Web services in the industry.