eDelivery Documentation
Capability Lookup
Once the sender discovers the address of the receiver’s SMP (Service Metadata Publisher), it is able to retrieve the needed information (i.e. metadata) about the receiver. With such information, the message can be sent.
Capability lookup is about the delivery of metadata about the capabilities of each participant in a document and data exchange network. The metadata can be used to dynamically set interoperability parameters between the sender and the receiver.
- Participant A puts the metadata of the participant into the SMP
- Participant B retrieves the signed metadata of Participant A
Which components are involved
Component
Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) - The SMP is a register of the message exchange capabilities and location of participants. The SMP is usually distributed
Standards
OASIS SMP - Specification originally developed by PEPPOL
More information about the SMP standard are available here.
Capability lookup, what are the benefits
Interoperability
The information about the participants (what messages they can process, the message protocol that they support, …) is easily discoverable and accessible to you and to everyone else in the data exchange network.
You can easily change and discover the registered address of nodes.
Security
- You are certain that the origin and the destination of the data and documents are trustworthy
Scalability and Performance
- You are certain that the message exchange network will adapt to an increasing number of nodes, as opposed to a stable number of nodes