OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new group to define a lightweight subset of the Web services protocol suite that will make it easy to find, share, and control devices on a network. The OASIS Web Services Discovery and Web Services Devices Profile (WS-DD) Technical Committee will enable printers, storage devices, sensors, building security devices, entertainment systems, energy management equipment, hand-held computers, cell phones, remote controls, and many other devices to be identified, communicated with, and controlled using Web services.

The Web Services Interoperability Organization announced that three of its Profiles have been published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 29361, 29362 and 29363. WS-I's Basic Profile 1.1 provides interoperability guidance for a core set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, along with interoperability-promoting clarifications and amendments to those specifications; Attachments Profile 1.0 complements the Basic Profile to add support for interoperable SOAP

...Being able to connect a UDDI registry/repository, where you store all of the metadata of your services, their locations, and their policies for use in one place, with a strong Validation strategy can be a big advantage in this environment. But to make it work, that validation process has to be continuous and ingrained into every phase of the lifecycle of your services.

Microsoft has been slow to get on the SOA bandwagon. But it is starting to make some progress as it readies its registry/repository. This new offering will be built on top of SQL server and will include a UDDI version 3 service registry. For Master Data Management (MDM) - single view of the customer, Microsoft will create an offering based on SQLServer. It also views Sharepoint as a focal point for MDM. It intends to build an entity data model to support its MDM strategy.