The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) project was announced today by a large cross-section of the companies involved in the business-to-business commerce space.

UDDI makes heavy use of XML Schemas and SOAP. The press release mentions that beta implementations of the UDDI Business Registry will be available from Ariba, IBM and Microsoft within 30 days. The UDDI.org website has a number of documents available for both the management and technical reader. All of the documents are only currently available in MSWord and PDF format.

In parallel, James Tauber of Bowstreet (one of the founding members of UDDI) has started an opensource implementation of UDDI on sourceforge.