BEA AquaLogic Service Registry is a fully V3-compliant implementation of the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) specification, and is a key component of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). A UDDI registry provides a standards-based foundation for locating services, invoking services and managing metadata about services (security, transport or quality of service). A UDDI registry can store and provide these metadata using arbitrary categorizations. These categorizations are called taxonomies.

This introduction has the following sections: