Roger Costello and David Jacobs have announced a project to collaboratively develop a distributed registry technology for web services as an alternative to UDDI or ebXML's centralized strategies.

Costello and Jacobs describe the purpose of a distributed registry:

A Web service registry provides information about what services do, and how they are used. Today's Web service registries (e.g., UDDI and ebXML) are implemented as centralized repositories. That is, all services store their service descriptions within a single, or a small number of registries. The purpose of this effort is to develop a concrete, implementable architecture for a highly distributed registry. The notion is that each Web service defines their own registry - comprised of the collection of documents that describes the service.

The project has a home page that describes it more fully, including details of design goals and a mailing list.

The IPR status of the project isn't explicitly defined, aside from the notice on the home page that "This material is made freely available in the public interest. Any use of this material must acknowledge The MITRE Corporation and the distributed-registry list group."