[Disc09/sort of]: Use of UDDI with WSDM.

[Fred Carter <fred.carter@amberpoint.com>]

    /[Disc09]
     From management repository to EPR. This is the topic of the thesis
    that Fred is currently writing as part of his action item to the
    group...  ;-) Basically, how much do we want to specify about the
    involvement of registries in MUWS.
    /


Well, what I had signed up for was really use of UDDI for [some of] this 
information.  At a high level, I think that UDDI as a registry for web 
services is quite appropriate for use in relating management providers 
to the web services they manage.  I suspect it is less appropriate for 
"other" managed objects.  Nonetheless...

The final result for this AI will likely be a tech note shared between 
the WSDM & UDDI groups.  It is still in a rough form;  this note 
outlines the basic ideas for purposes of discussion.

As background, [a simplistic overview of UDDI states that] UDDI divides 
the world into three constituent entity types:  Business entities, 
business services, and binding templates.  These are arranged in a 
hierarchy whereby business entities form an organizational unit in which 
one places business services;  business services, in turn, represent 
business functions which are available via binding templates. Binding 
templates generally refer to real endpoints.

The world, as defined above, is described by technical models (or 
tModels).  There are a number of predefined tModels (for WSDL and its 
constituent parts, various business categorization forms, etc.), and 
users can define their own tModels to represent various things.  tModels 
can be used to describe identity & categorization as well as more 
detailed things like current state, etc.

For a better description, see the uddi section @ oasis (also available 
via uddi.org).  Anyway, on to the show...


      Proposal Overview

At a high level, we propose to set up a different business entity (or 
entities) for managability providers.  Where some organization may have 
a single (or multiple) business entities which contain its collection of 
services and bindings, another one (or few/many) would be added to 
contain the management providers.

Within such an entity, each MP would be represented by a business 
service entry.  Amongst the information available about the MP would be 
the following:

    * A list of the binding templates (i.e. endpoints) for which it
      provides services,
    * The management capabilities it would offer on behalf of said binding
    * The resource ID (EPR, whatever) by which to reference the managed
      service/object


The separation of the managability providers into a separate business 
entity allows the current usage within the organization of UDDI to 
continue without significant change;  only those interested in 
management /stuff/ (to use a technical term) need be concerned with the 
other entities.

The result of this is that if you want to find the MP for a service, you 
can query UDDI for services whose category bag contains a reference to a 
your bindingTemplate.  Having found such a service, it will contain the 
resource identification for your service w.r.t. the MP in question.  
Furthermore, you have the list of capabilities that it can provide (this 
looks similar to UDDI's WSDL decomposition).


-- 
Fred Carter / AmberPoint, Inc.

mailto:fred.carter@amberpoint.com
tel:+1.510.433.6525 fax:+1.510.663.6301

1.510.433.6525 fax:+1.510.663.6301