Please Put UDDI Out of Its Misery.

From an article published on CNET today:

An international standards body announced Wednesday that it has taken on the task of improving on the omnipresent URL, or Web address, to give developers a cleaner way to design and locate Web services.

The international standards body is OASIS. The proposed effort is called Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) a method for identifying any resource--from a Web service to a particular file--across different network domains, applications and transport protocols.

The article continues:

You can think of XRI as a system that provides 'URLs for everything'--data, systems, organizations, services and people. Currently, we don't have a single, application and protocol-neutral way for identifying these types of resources, said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink.

XRI will build off the URL systems of today and work with the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), a Web services standard that provides a listing for locating Web services on a network, according to the OASIS committee. It is designed to go further than the leading network directory standard, LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), in unifying different types of network directories, Bloomberg said.

I don't see what's new here other then including UDDI into the mix -- something that should have happened in the first place with existing URLs, DNS and Web infrastructure.

[UPDATE: I still stand behind my assertion on WSIL when I wrote It's what the Web services space needs now. I would go so far as to argue that WSIL should have preceded UDDI as the solution we all need for services discovery, and is a logical stepping stone towards extensive Web services repository services for those who eventually require them. It disappoints me that WSIL has not received more attention or scrutiny.]

Someone please put UDDI out of its misery. The attempts to make UDDI useful and worthwhile keep getting more and more desperate. The RESTonians are going to have a field day with this. Its so crazy they may just completely ignore it.