The present invention provides an apparatus, method and computer program product for a registry, such as a UDDI registry, to restrict access to business entity definitions contained in the registry according to permission details associated with the business service definition. A business entity definition may comprise a plurality of information elements. Permission details, which define users or groups of users with permission to access the information element, are then associated with one or more of these information elements. When a user request is received to access a business entity definition access is restricted to only those information elements for which the user has the required permission.