A General Purpose Registry/Repository Information Model

-We propose a UML model and an XML services interface for a general-purpose registry/repository. In general, a registry is a facility that stores relevant descriptive information about registered objects, and a registered object is something important that an author or producer wants to have visible to the world so that it can be discovered and used by a client or customer. A registry can operate independently, or it can be paired with a repository that stores the registered objects. A repository is simply a storage facility for registered objects, with an access method allowing one to retrieve individual objects by object reference. In electronic commerce, a registry/repository is an integrated software system that supports access to registry metadata in order to locate and retrieve registered objects useful toward solving some problem. A registry/repository implementation supports a registry services interface that can be used by abstract agents to assist a human or some other software process to register new objects, provide appropriate metadata for those objects, browse or query registry content, filter out irrelevant references, and retrieve the content of selected items. We anticipate a large number of registry/repository implementations in electronic commerce, each focusing on registering objects of interest to some sponsoring group. Each implementation will provide one or more classifications of the registered objects according to classification schemes important to its sponsoring group and will identify specific dependencies or associations among the registered objects to help an agent determine those objects of specific interest. If each such implementation had a different agent interface, then an agent might be overwhelmed with the hundreds, or even thousands, of specialized interfaces available. NIST is developing a general-purpose registry/repository information model capable of supporting a wide range of implementations, each catering to the specific requirements of some sponsoring group, yet having a well-defined, standard registry services interface accessible to virtually any electronic agent. We are also developing a prototype implementation for the OASIS specialization.