This chapter presents the functional components of the Web services architecture that are used to locate Web services on a network and to determine the service's availability: the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) protocol and WS-Discovery [WS-Discovery].
Web service discovery is a key enabler for automating connections to services without human intervention. The Web service approach to discovery mirrors the two most common approaches to finding information in a distributed computer system: looking in a well-known location or broadcasting a request to all available listeners. The UDDI registries serve as the directory, and discovery protocols are used to broadcast requests.