Currently IBM, Microsoft, NTT-Com and SAP maintain and operate publicly available UDDI-based service registries under a framework known as UBR (Universal Business Registry). The UBR nodes are regularly replicated, but there are no SLAs to describe the availability of the service. As of the time of this writing, UBR is the only viable generic registry available to the public.

It is worth emphasizing that UBR is a public registry, and that all information that is published to it will be available for everyone to find. For example, the URL of the WSDL file and the URL of the access point of the web service will be available to the public. Therefore, appropriate care should be taken to secure the web services against unauthorized access or other types of security risks such as denial of service attacks before publishing the access point URLs.

Microsoft and IBM (and probably others in the UBR framework) provides special version of its UDDI registry for testing and prototyping purposes. This provides an easy and freely available platform to test UDDI usage before moving it to production.

Currently UDDI is heavily focused on the management of Service Descriptions, and is not viewed as a generic repository. The ebXML RegRep initiative is viewed as a more generic repository that could store and manage many types of artifacts. STAR will continue discussion and requirement gathering among STAR members to assess the need for common generic repository.

A generic registry SHOULD include ebXML CPP and possibly CPA artifacts to accelerate trading partner enablement.

A generic registry MAY include Digital Certificates, so that the public key of a STAR participant is easily available in a consistent manner to enable Digital Signature.

The role that the STAR consortium itself should play in the development and possible hosting of a Registry/Repository has not been defined at this time. STAR recognizes that there are key features that make sense to pursue as a community, but it is not clear yet that STAR is in a position to physically build and maintain a Registry. Features that may be provided at the upstream automotive community level, or STAR level, would include: