Last week's UDDI Face to Face meeting in San Francisco (hosted by Maud Cahuzac and Shishir Garg of France Telecom) was extremely productive. All of the details and minutes are public up on the OASIS UDDI site (there's nothing here that you won't see there in other words). But to summarize:
- Concrete progress was made on nailing down a method of range searching for category values. This is particularly crucial for some proposals we are working with others on for storing management information associated with web services in the registry.
- A simple method of performing boolean searching with category bags and combinations of them, without requiring a fullfledged new query language, looks like it will be introduced. The default of reducing everything to conjunctive normal form by default (implied OR for values within category bags, and implied AND between category bags) is great way to get arbitrarily complex queries without forcing learning and implementation of new "keywords"
- There was a proposed simplification of requirements of taxonomies to concentrate on identity between nodes (within and across trees) and parent/child relationships. It needs to be verified further but I think its a step in the right direction. After the goals are agreed upon, I would imagine it should be quick work to come up with a representation: whether its based on an existing format such as a subset of OWL or RDF, or a new format entirely.
- Methods of representing ACLs were worked on, which is an important thing to happen I think, though I wasn't attending that track of the session.
- It was agreed that it would be value for the UDDI TC to put out a Tech Note, in consultation with WSDM, for storing quality of service information in UDDI. Fred Carter of AmberPoint and I will be working on this, with hopefully lots of guidance and help from other management vendors on WSDM and sage advice from UDDI TC members.
Speaking of sage advice, Tom Bellwood of IBM did a great job driving topics to quick, practical and shorter term closure. All of this bodes quite well for UDDI in general. In my days as VPE at Commerce One I remember not being enthusiastic about UDDI V1. But UDDI V3 is a very solid specification as it stands. And the enhancements discussed seem like they should be able to be layered on top of V3 without major changes and thus are perhaps not too far in the future in being available to customers. Whether its Systinet or IBM or Microsoft's UDDI registry, companies should strongly consider using a current UDDI implementation as the central site for storing all of their web service information.
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