From the JAXWS-2.-0 spec

4.4 Catalog Facility

JAX-WS mandates support for a standard catalog facility to be used when resolving any Web service docu- 15
ment that is part of the description of a Web service, specifically WSDL and XML Schema documents. 16
The facility in question is the OASIS XML Catalogs 1.1 specification [30]. It defines an entity catalog that 17
handles the following two cases: 18
? Mapping an external entity?s public identifier and/or system identifier to a URI reference. 19
? Mapping the URI reference of a resource to another URI reference. 20
Using the entity catalog, an application can package one or more description and/or schema documents in 21
jar files, avoiding costly remote accesses, or remap remote URIs to other, possibly local ones. Since the 22
catalog is an XML document, a deployer can easily alter it to suit the local environment, unbeknownst to 23
the application code. 24
The catalog is assembled by taking into account all accessible resources whose name is META-INF/jax- 25
-ws-catalog.xml. Each resource MUST be a valid entity catalog according to the XML Catalogs 1.1 26
specification. When running on the Java SE platform, the current context class loader MUST be used to 27
retrieve all the resources with the specified name. Relative URIs inside a catalog file are relative to the 28
location of the catalog that contains them. 29
} Conformance (Use of the Catalog): In the process of resolving a URI that points to a WSDL document 30
or any document reachable from it, a JAX-WS implementation MUST perform a URI resolution for it, as 31
prescribed by the XML Catalogs 1.1 specification, using the catalog defined above as its entity catalog. 32
In particular, every JAX-WS API argument or annotation element whose semantics is that of a WSDL 33
location URI MUST undergo URI resolution using the catalog facility described in this section. 34
Although defined in the client API chapter for reasons of ease of exposure, use of the catalog is in no way 35
restricted to client uses of WSDL location URIs. In particular, resolutions of URIs to WSDL and schema 36
documents that arise during the publishing of endpoint metadata (see 5.2.5) are subject to the requirements 37
in this section, resulting in catalog-based URI resolutions.

There is a catalog implementation by Apache
http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/

XML Entity and URI Resolvers
http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/resolver-article.html