Discovery Service

The Discovery Service is a web service that allows a requesting entity, such as a service provider, to dynamically determine a principal’s registered attribute provider. Typically, a service provider queries the Discovery Service, which responds by providing a resource offering that describes the location of the requested attribute provider. (A resource offering defines associations between a piece of identity data and the service instance that provides access to the data.) The implementation of the Discovery Service includes Java and web-based interfaces. For more information, see Chapter 8, Discovery Service.

By definition, a discoverable service is assigned a service type Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), allowing the service to be registered in Discovery Service instances. The service type URI is typically defined in the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) file that defines the service.