O N Lean M Essaging with Wrapping and Unfolding for Electronic Commerce

¤ S t e ve n O. K im b r o u g h U n ive r s it y o f P e n n s ylva n ia , 3 6 2 0 L o c u s t W a lk, S u it e 1 3 0 0 , P h ila d e lp h ia , P A 1 9 1 0 4-6 3 6 6 Abstr act EDI (electronic data interchange) messages are notoriously lean and di±cult (or impossible) to interpret without additional information. While recognizing and sympathizing with the many criticisms that have been made of the design of EDI protocols, we argue in this paper that there is something basically correct, even inevitable , in the noted leanness of EDI messages. By way of making this case, we present a framework that describes how interpretation of EDI messages works, and indeed must work. Central elements of this framework are what we call wrapping and unfolding of messages. We present and discuss these concepts in some detail. Further, we demonstrate how to exploit these concepts in formalizations for electronic commerce. In particular, we show how Kimbrough's event semantics for speech acts and Tan's theory of directed obligation can be ¯t naturally and fruitfully into this framework, and to each other. Much work remains to be done, but the progress in formalization in evidence here should be generalizable. Most observers of, and indeed most participants in, EDI would agree that present technology and standards for computer-to-computer exchange of structured information are importantly, even fundamentally, de¯cient. 1 Regar d in g comput er-t o-comput er exchan ge of st r uct ur ed in-for mat ion , th is can ser v e as a r ou gh d e¯ n ition of E DI (electr on ic d ata in ter ch an ge). Costs are too high, the ¯rst-trade problem is daunting and discourages SMEs (small-and medium-sized enter-prizes) from participating in EDI, too much manual intervention is needed even for well-established systems, EDI protocols are not suited to the Web, there is no semantics for existing protocols (or only incomplete and confused ones), and so on (cf., [12, 16, 30] among many others). All this and more is part of the received wisdom today, and we largely agree. What to do? The usual move in Information Systems when faced with …