Discovery of Web Services ( DISCO) provides a way to discover and retrieve an SDL or SCL description of services on remote machines. Using the Discovery Document Format (which is also an XML grammar), one can send a discovery document to a remote server and, if any SOAP enabled services (AKA web service) exist, receive back an SDL or SCL description of the services provided. Read more about DISCO
DISCO or "Discovery of Web Services" is a draft protocol for discovery of services proposed by Microsoft. It assumes that Web Services are described using SCL (SOAP Contract Language) documents. Hence, it proposes how SCL documents can be retrieved for a resource or a collection of resources, i.e. how information about a service is discovered. It is not limited to discovering information about Web Services, it can be used to find metadata for any resource. The discovery itself can be of two types Discovering endpoints for a service Discovering orchestration for a service i.e. the when and how messages are sent from endpoint to endpoint. See also RDF, SCL. More at http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/disco.asp
The term Disco is used to refer to the SOAP discovery process. The Disco specification builds on SOAP and XML to allow a client to discover the services and features that a Web Service provides.