Registries play a key role in service-oriented applications. Originally, they were neutral players between service providers and clients. The UDDI Business Registry (UBR) was meant to foster these concepts and provide a common reference for companies interested in Web services. The more Web services were used, the more companies started create their own local registries: more efficient discovery processes, better control over the quality of published information, and also more sophisticated publication policies motivated the creation of private repositories. The number and heterogeneity of the different registries - besides the decision to close the UBR are pushing for new and sophisticated means to make different registries cooperate. This paper proposes DIRE (DIstributed REgistry), a novel approach based on a publish and subscribe (P/S) infrastructure to federate different heterogeneous registries and make them exchange information about published services. The paper discusses the main motivations for the P/S-based infrastructure, proposes an integrated service model, introduces the main components of the framework, and exemplifies them on a simple case study.