SERVICE DISCOVERY
OVERVIEW
A key component of a Service Enabled Environment is a registry or repository containing information about the services which make up that environment. This registry/repository not only provides a catalog of services, it provides valuable information about the author of the service, the functionality of the service, service interface details and categorization information. This "service registry" is intended to provide all of the information required for a application developer to locate an appropriate service; determine the features and functions provided by that service; identify how to invoke the service; and determine where that service resides. The NCES Service Discovery Service provides such a registry/repository.
NCES Service Discovery consists of a COTS UDDI (Version 3.0 compliant) registry, which has been customized to provide service governance, as well as enhanced end user access. Web services are also available to enable service publishing and service discovery at the application layer.
The Systinet product is currently being used to provide the UDDI registry capability and the Policy Manager feature of Systinet 2 is being used for service governance.
NEWS
Managed Service Provider Selected
On November 19th, the NCES Program announced that Computer Science Corporation was awarded the Managed Service Provider contract for the SOA Foundation Services. As a result of this contract, BEA Systems will be the provider of the software solution for NCES Service Discovery. BEA provides a 2-product solution for service management with its AuqaLogic Registry Repository. The registry portion of this solution, AuqaLogic Service Registry, is actually the Systinet UDDI Registry, which NCES has already been using for Service Discovery. The AuqaLogic Enterprise Repository (formally the Flashline repository) is a repository for managing SOA metadata, governing the asset lifecycle, and measuring SOA effectiveness.
Service Registry & Governance Working Group Established
A new Working Group has been established to address service governance, as well as cross-domain (Department of Defense/Intelligence Community) service registration issues. This Working Group, which held is initial meeting on 30 October 2007, reports directly into the ES ERB; is a technical working group that provides Service Registration technical specifications; and also a forum for developing policies and guidelines for managing service metadata in an Enterprise Service Registry. For more information on this Working Group, go to the SR&G Working Group home page. 
