OASIS OKs UDDI 2; next up, an expanded 3.0 version

IDG News Service - The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) yesterday said it has ratified Version 2.0 of the UDDI Web services specification, an important step toward finalization of the widely awaited, significantly expanded 3.0 version of the standard.
Together with XML, SOAP and the Web Services Description Language, UDDI forms the foundation for the standards-based Web services architecture many vendors are endorsing as a way to link disparate data and applications. Of the four standards, UDDI has been the most sparsely adopted. Security issues have held up wide implementation of the specification for publishing, locating and integrating with Web services, but a number of vendors backing UDDI say features planned for Version 3 will help address those concerns.
In a prepared statement, Eugene Kuznetsov, chairman and chief technical officer at DataPower Technology Inc., a UDDI technical committee member, said, "UDDI has the potential to do for server-to-server communication what DNS did for the Internet, by making it much easier and cheaper to connect and stay connected to services."
Other committee members include Microsoft Corp., IBM, SAP AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Computer Associates International Inc.
Committee co-chairman Tom Bellwood, a senior technical staff member at IBM, forecast that UDDI use will significantly pick up when Version 3 features become available, such as support for digital signatures and multiregistry environments. UDDI support is included in the latest version of IBM's WebSphere Application Server.