STAR business partners can benefit from the ability to Discover Service Descriptions. In other words, partners can lookup available business services by partner name, service name, service type, etc and then download the Service Description and use it to accelerate the development of production data exchanges.

STAR REQUIRES that Discovery protocols be non-proprietary standards.

STAR REQUIRES that Registries support the notion of Service Transparency. In other words, there is a clear separation between the public interface and the underlying implementation of a Service. For example, it should be possible to completely replace an underlying database supporting a service, the public API interface available through the Registry can remain unchanged, and the end-user may not be aware that a significant change was made to the underlying implementation.

STAR REQUIRES that Registries support the notion of Location Transparency. In other words, the physical location of a Business Service may change but the process of Discovery does not; an end-user still navigates through the Registry to find the Service, and the Registry can lead the end-user to the new location of the Service in a transparent manner.

STAR REQUIRES that Registries are capable of managing multiple versions of services, including versions that are backward compatible, non-compatible or that enable transparent behind the scenes changes.  

The STAR Web Services Specification includes a detailed discussion on implementing these features under UDDI in the section entitled UDDI and Versioning.