In SOA (service oriented architecture), the service registry takes place an important role which complies with UDDI (universal description, discovery and integration) specification. However, some tough problems are still in the way of present UDDI registry. For example, current registry has to replicate all web service publications in all UBR (universal business registry) nodes, and thus becomes impractical for a large number of web services. Furthermore, present UDDI registry is a passive directory and cannot guarantee the real-time validity of the services. In this paper, an active distributed architecture named as adUDDI is proposed for federated web service publication and discovery among multiple registries. With the distributed architecture, the service information is published within one or more adUDDIs so as to avoid the performance bottlenecks in centralized configuration. With the active monitoring mechanism, the service information is updated automatically and then the service requestor may find the latest service information. Finally, comprehensive simulations are evaluated and the results show that it outperforms the existing approaches.