A Meta Message Approach for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Still most of the current information systems are intra-organizational. Since products, services and production processes have become more information intensive, there is an increased need to transfer these information between organizations. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards have been proposed to exchange these information between two independently operating information systems. All these standards have in common that they standardize business documents—which represent the relevant information—on instance type level. Since a data interchange between business partners is always based on a small subset of the standards, it is necessary to agree upon this subset. In our paper we present a concept for interchanging this agreement via EDI itself. The presented concept leads to a standardization on the meta level.