It is a common misnomer that SOA Governance is optional for an organization. However, for a particular business to succeed, it is of paramount importance to have a proper governance mechanism in place, no matter how large the organization is and how many services it offers. A Service Registry is a key component in defining and enforcing SOA Governance. It should be UDDI v-3 compliant (for complete UDDI specification, please visit UDDI Version 3.0.2) and provide a foundation for the governance and lifecycle management of Business Services. The Registry should provide with what is needed to obtain enterprise-wide insight, control and economic leverage of organization's business and service artifacts. Much more than just a UDDI registry, the Registry should capture and make discoverable business service descriptions into a centrally managed, reliable and searchable location, becoming the system of record for your business services.

For a particular Business Service to gain visibility and value it is not only important to have all the necessary information appearing in the Service Registry but a meaningful representation of this information is also vital. It should be ensured that all the information artifacts describing the service are published in a well-defined manner. This is of paramount importance as there may be ‘n’ number of artifacts to be published.

While catalogging, the intention should be to extract the necessary information from the artifacts and present them in an efficient and useful manner in the registry. The UDDI data structure model will be used to serve this purpose. Overlaying classification and categorization schemes and modeling information will surely help customer make optimal use of data. A complete service registry should allow user to define multiple taxonomies on each entity within the information model. This will improve the granularity of information so that more precise search queries can be issued to discover and access data. User-defined taxonomies and tModels must be defined for this purpose. Also, the user should be provided with the capability to publish artifacts in bulk as and when need arises. The artifacts should be designed and documented in such a way that information can be retrieved and published in a manner desired by the service provider.

The registry should have a publication wizard that supports publishing service information artifacts in bulk. Also, the artifacts should be loaded in a flexible way allowing the user to extract annotations as well as insert or update additional details about the artifact and keeping the structure agile at the same time. Also, different classification and identification schemes need to be identified and attributed with metadata using user-defined tModels thereby, not mandating stringent adherence to existing tModels.

The registry should support features, which makes life of both service provider and consumer a lot easier. This is possible as there is huge scope to leverage existing features by identifying strategies to optimize the role of the registry. Existing taxonomies can be reviewed to improve the search process thereby extending reuse of services. It is thus not only important to figure out what artifacts needs to be published but also how they need to be represented so as to make an optimal use. In other words, marshalling resources is very important to prevent chaos in Service-Oriented Architecture. The success of any business or organization and eventually the success of its Service-Oriented Architecture depend heavily on a service registry as a system of record. Therefore, the registry offers more flexibility to the developers in making optimum use of its information model. Also, designing policies and their enforcement mechanisms is crucial when it comes to SOA Governance. But still a lot depends on how you map your business into the overall SOA Model.