Discovery Protocols
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Date:
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March 13, 2003
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Author:
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Ken Steube
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Version:
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1.0
Overview
Web service discovery mechanisms are created to provide a means to locate
web services that are of interest to your research or business. More specifically,
three types of lookups are used when locating web services:
| white pages |
organization's name and contact info |
| yellow pages |
industrial category and geographical location |
| green pages |
how to use a service |
Included below is a summary of the features, strengths and weaknesses of
MOBY-Central, UDDI, LDAP and ebXML. I added CORBA Trader to the list to
contrast an older binary protocol method to the newer text-based protocol
methods.
MOBY-Central
| Name |
Model Organism Bring Your own |
| Reference |
http://biomoby.org |
| Reference |
http://biomoby.org/wilkinson_links_2002.pdf |
| Purpose |
an architecture for the discovery and distribution of biological data
through web services |
| Provides |
white pages, yellow pages, green pages |
| Strengths |
object-driven registry query system with object and service ontologies,
can easily adapt to new data types, we have our own data types so it's
easy to have output of one service be input to another |
| Weaknesses |
not industry standard, relatively few developers and users |
UDDI
| Name |
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration |
| Reference |
http://uddi.org |
| Reference |
Charles Goldfarb's XML Handbook, 4th edition, page 689 |
| Purpose |
UDDI creates a standard interoperable platform that enables companies
and applications to quickly, easily, and dynamically find and use Web services
over the Internet |
| Provides |
white pages, yellow pages, green pages |
| Strengths |
Web services may be described with WSDL and invoked with SOAP, so it
builds upon two popular standards |
| Weaknesses |
TBD |
ebXML
| Name |
Electronic Business using XML |
| Reference |
http://ebxml.org |
| Purpose |
ebXML is a set of specifications that together enable a modular electronic
business framework. The vision of ebXML is to enable a global electronic
marketplace where enterprises of any size and in any geographical location
can meet and conduct business with each other through the exchange of XML
based messages |
| Strengths |
TBD |
| Weaknesses |
TBD |
LDAP
| Name |
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol |
| Reference |
http://openldap.org |
| Reference |
Charles Goldfarb's XML Handbook, 4th edition, page 239 |
| Purpose |
provides a networked database for resource management |
| Standards |
X.500 |
| Related |
Directory Service Markup Language (DSML) helps provide a linkage
between LDAP service and legacy resource management systems |
| Strengths |
TBD |
| Weaknesses |
not intended for scientific data, but rather for storing info about
people and hardware resources |
CORBA Trader
| Name |
Common Object Request Broker Architecture |
| Reference |
http://www-mtl.mit.edu/~mvermins/corba/trader |
| Purpose |
yellow pages for CORBA services |
| Provides |
white pages, yellow pages, green pages |
| Strengths |
TBD |
| Weaknesses |
binary protocol means interoperability problems between systems with
different operating systems and with different binary representations such
as endian order, does not use latest industry favorite SOAP, CORBA programming
is very specialized with a steep learning curve |