1. A method for facilitating the sharing of a metadata document by a plurality of software applications, the method comprising: receiving, from a software application in the plurality of software applications, a uniform resource locator (URL) for the metadata document, the URL including a protocol component identifying a specialized protocol name and a path component identifying a name and namespace of the metadata document, the specialized protocol name indicating that the metadata document is stored in a shared metadata repository; and identifying the shared metadata repository based on configuration information associated with the software application.