The OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) consortium said Tuesday it has ratified version 2.0 of the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) Web services specification, an important step toward finalization of the widely awaited, significantly expanded 3.0 version of the standard.

Together with XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language), UDDI forms the foundation for the standards-based Web services architecture many vendors are endorsing as a way to link disparate data and applications. Of the four standards, UDDI has been the most sparsely adopted. Security issues have held up wide implementation of the specification for publishing, locating and integrating with Web services, but a number of vendors backing UDDI say features planned for version 3 will help address those concerns.

"UDDI has the potential to do for server-to-server communication what DNS did for the Internet, by making it much easier and cheaper to connect and stay connected to services," said Eugene Kuznetsov, chairman and chief technical officer of OASIS' UDDI technical committee member DataPower Technology Inc., in a prepared statement.

Other committee members include Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., SAP AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Computer Associates International Inc.

Committee co-chair Tom Bellwood, of IBM, forecast that UDDI use will significantly pick up when version 3 features become available, such as support for digital signatures and multiregistry environments. UDDI support is included in the latest version of IBM's WebSphere Application Server.