Universal Description and Discovery Information (UDDI) is a type of registry whose primary purpose is to represent information about web services. It describes the service providers, the services that provider offers, and in some cases, the specific technical specifications for interacting with those services. While UDDI was originally envisioned as a public, platform independent registry that companies could exploit for listing and consuming services, it seems that many have chosen instead to use UDDI as an internal resource for categorizing and describing their available enterprise services.
Besides simply listing available services for others to search and peruse, UDDI is arguably most beneficial for those who wish to perform runtime binding to service endpoints. Instead of hard-coding a service path in a client application, one may query UDDI for a particular service's endpoint and apply it to their active service call. While UDDI is typically used for web services, nothing...