Discovering E-Services Using UDDI in SELF-SERV Quan Z. Sheng, Boualem Benatallah, Rayan Stephan, Eileen Oi-Yan Mak, Yan Q. Zhu School of Computer Science and Engineering The University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia Tel: +61 2 9385 7998 Fax: +61 2 9385 5533 {qsheng, boualem, rayans, eileenm, yqzhu }@cse.unsw.edu.au Abstract One of the key needs for businesses today over the Internet is the ability to dynamically discover services that they need, and compose them in an interoperable manner to carry out their business processes. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is a new technology that offers a standard way for businesses to build a registry, discover each other and describe how to interact over the Internet. In this paper, we discuss how UDDI is integrated into a Web service composition framework. Keywords: e-services, advertisement and discovery, UDDI 1. Introduction As e-business increasingly move towards an environment of machine-to-machine interoperations, efficient discovery and composition of Web services become essential. By Web service (also called e- service) 1 , we mean a semantically well defined abstraction that allows users to access functionalities offered by Web applications. A typical example of a Web service is booking an airline ticket through an HTML-based interface. There seems to be a consensus that the future of e-business collaboration will be through Web services. Web service composition is a very active area of research and development [4]. For instance, HP has developed a platform, called eFlow [2, 3], for specifying, enacting, and monitoring composite Web services. 1 In the remainder, we use the terms e-service, Web service and service interchangeably. Correspondence to: Quan Z. Sheng, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. SELF-SERV [1] project focuses on declarative Web services composition using statecharts [12], where the resulting services can be executed in a decentralised way within a dynamic environment. However, all these service composition frameworks assume that Web services can be easily collected using some certain service discovery tools. UDDI [6] is a new technology announced by Microsoft, IBM and Ariba. It provides a set of specifications that define a way to publish and discover information about Web services. It offers a standard way for businesses to build a registry, discover each other, and describe how to interact over the Internet. In our research project SELF-SERV (compoSing wEb accessibLe inFormation & buSiness sERVices), we implemented the Service Discovery Engine using UDDI 2 . In this paper, we show in details on how UDDI is integrated into SELF-SERV platform for Web services advertisement and discovery. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: in Section 2, we introduce the basic concepts of UDDI. In Section 3, we briefly introduce Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and then describe how UDDI, WSDL and SOAP work together for Web service advertisement and discovery. In Section 4, we discuss the implementation of the SELF-SERV Service Discovery Engine. Finally, conclusion is given in Section 5. 2. Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) UDDI is an industry effort started in September 2000 by Ariba, IBM, Microsoft and other 33 companies. It is a specification that defines a service registry of available Web services. It allows a company to publish a 2 In the former implementation, we just used discovery engine in AgFlow [10] project.