Understanding UDDI Services Entities and Organization

Understanding UDDI Services Entities and Organization

UDDI Services provides UDDI capabilities for use within an enterprise or between business partners. It includes a Web interface with searching, publishing, and coordination features that are compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later and Netscape Navigator 4.5, or later. UDDI Services supports the UDDI version 1.0 and 2.0 APIs, enabling enterprise developers to publish, discover, share, and interact with Web services directly through their development tools and business applications.

Organizations and the products and services they provide are represented by the following entities in UDDI Services.

The following definitions describe each entity and its role in relation to other entities.

Provider A party—any business, or physical or conceptual group—that offers one or more XML Web services. For example, a business, business unit, organization, organizational department, person, computer, or an application can be a provider in UDDI Services. A provider represents the "parent" entity under which all contact, service, and interface information is stored and organized.

Contact A human or computer resource that can be contacted for information about a provider or the XML Web services it offers. A provider may have as many contacts as is necessary to identify each of its available contact points.

Service An entity that describes and provides access to a function you would like to share with other users. Services can perform any function across a network, from simple requests to complicated business processes. A stock ticker feed and an online procurement system are each examples of functions that can be published as a service. Services may have one or more bindings.

Binding The point where a specific implementation of a service can be accessed, such as the URL where an interface can be found. Bindings may also include one or more instance infos structures.

Instance Info A reference to a tModel that contains relevant technical information about a binding, such as an interface specification document or Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file.

tModel tModels are typically used to provide technical information about an interface, such as a Web Service Description Language (WSDL) file, that describes the conventions that are supported by an interface. tModels are also used to represent an organized unit of descriptive data, such as an identification or categorization scheme. How tModels are used in your implementation may vary, depending upon your organization's Web services publishing data model.

Each entity is defined by one or more of the following attributes.

Categorization Scheme A collection of categories and subcategories used to describe and locate providers, services, and tModels. A categorization scheme may contain public classifications, such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). It may also contain company-defined categorizations. For example, useful categorization schemes might be constructed around geographical locations, industry segments, or a company's organizational structure. Categorization provides a consistent means by which users may search for providers and services or locate interfaces of a particular type, location, or other attribute.

Overview Document URL An address of an Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)-accessible resource that hosts data or information you would like to associate with an entity. For example, a tModel overview document might provide the URL to an interface definition or Web Service Description Language (WSDL) file that provides technical information that is required to invoke a service through an interface. For an instance info, an overview document might provide additional technical information that is only applicable to a specific implementation of an interface.

Discovery URL An HTTP accessible resource that typically responds to an HTTP-GET request with technical information describing a provider. When a provider is created, UDDI Services automatically creates a discovery URL pointing to that provider's businessEntity within that instalation of UDDI Services.

Identifier An organization-wide identification scheme used to logically group providers and tModels by a common form of identification, such as a cost code or D-U-N-S® Number. Identifiers are optional descriptions and are intended to enhance the discovery of providers and tModels in search operations.

Relationships The identity, parent-child or peer-peer relationships between providers. Relationships are useful, for example, when describing an organizational structure or advertising business partnerships.

Instance Parameters The settings or parameters that are supported by an instance of a binding. An instance parameter may be either a list of settings and parameters or the URL of a file that contains a list of supported settings and parameters.