External matching in UDDI

As an industry-backed registry for Web Services, UDDI plays an important role in helping requesters find suitable services. Unfortunately, the current search functions in UDDI are limited in their support for making automatic service selection decisions. While some approaches have been suggested to enhance the search capabilities in UDDI using service semantics, they suffer from limitations. These approaches either prescribe performing semantic matching outside of UDDI leaving its search function unchanged or propose embedding a specific matching engine within UDDI thereby making the search function inflexible. In this work, we present a flexible mechanism to enhance UDDI search function. Using our approach, users can integrate multiple external matching services with a UDDI registry to support multiple external service description languages. The result is a UDDI registry with flexible and intelligent service search function that can be used for dynamic service selection.