NTT Com Asia's First UDDI Business Registry Node Operator

 

UDDI Business Registry

NTT Communications (NTT Com) became Asia's first business registry node operator under the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Project on January 15, 2002.

UDDI is a worldwide industry initiative to provide businesses with a registry for quick and easy listing and searching for online services to promote business-to-business e-commerce (see www.uddi.org). The project was launched in the U.S. in September 2000 and now covers over 300 corporations.

The UDDI Business Registry is a global, platform-independent, open-architecture database. Individuals and companies search the registry by industry, product category and geographical location to look for a particular business or service. Any kind of service can be registered in the UDDI Business Registry, although the primary intent behind UDDI is to provide a global registry for web service.

It is often difficult for organizations to find a business that offers services best suited to their needs. UDDI makes it possible to quickly discover the right business out of the millions that are currently online. Once an organization finds a potential business partner, there is no standard mechanism to figure out how to conduct electronic business with this partner. UDDI makes it possible for organizations to describe their services and specify how they prefer to conduct business, so that partners can begin trading quickly and easily.

Node operators such as NTT Com are companies that provide access to the UDDI Business Registry. Operators regularly update their nodes with information from other nodes to ensure that all registrations are available to all users. Other node operators include Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett Packard and SAP, companies that are committed to the success of web services and share the view that the UDDI Business Registry is a cornerstone of web services infrastructure.

NTT Com launched its UDDI Business Registry node using cross-industry platforms and systems based on the latest Internet technology, including Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

The roadmap for the project, including UDDI specification, is still being determined. Once the project reaches a reasonable level of maturity, uddi.org intends to submit the UDDI specification to one or more standards bodies.

Version 1 Open Draft of the UDDI specification was announced and published in September 2000 and Version 2 was introduced in June 2001. The UDDI community expects to release one more version of the specification in the near future, prior to transition to a standards body.