---+ ProviderService

A provider service, often misleading just termed "provider" (creating confusion with the institutional body as the provider), is a kind of local MessageBrokerService. It is limited to adress local DatasourceServices opposed to a general MessageBroker.

It can take any request and pass it on to the single datasource or just some of them if it is specified in the request header as a list of destinations.

---+++++ Current Protocols
Right now only DiGIR is using it, and it serves
mainly as a resource discovery mechanism. This feature, although
interesting, is not considered essential since there are other ways
to achieve it. Part of the existing networks are already using UDDI.
And networks who are not using it could either use GBIF's UDDI
registry with a specific theme, or could install their own UDDI
registry - there's a free and open source alternative for that:
{jUDDI http://ws.apache.org/juddi/}. Local discovery services, even
not addressed by the specification, could be easily implemented by
specific wrappers, and could be incorporated in future versions of
the protocol if that really proves to be an important feature.
Another suggestion from the BerlinProtocolMeeting was to allow a
ProviderService to accept requests for multiple datasources at the
same time. This would be a new feature for both protocols, not
necessarily easy to implement, and not easily faster than a multi-
threaded web server handling multiple requests at the same time.