Another Approach to Standardising EDI

Almost twenty years have elapsed since the initial steps were taken, but Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) still remains the elitist preserve of a few of the larger companies. Australia together with the rest of the world make up a total of only 70'000 companies using EDI [1]. Compared to the number of businesses in the world, this rate of progress can only be described as very poor. The following article gives a summarization of a new approach to EDI standardi-sation which will lead to a faster dissemination of EDI [2]. characters can be chosen for the segment tag (except for around 20 reserved for service segments) and any data elements needed between a specific set of trading partners are used. This eliminates most 'null' elements and the overhead of the delimiters marking the missing data. 4. The ICSDEF meta-message is sent in front of the message containing the transaction data the first time an interchange takes place between a specific set of trading partners and whenever the structure of the data interchange is modified. The receiving partner stores this ICSDEF in a directory for use in decoding any future messages for that type of transaction from that trading partner in the future. 5. The basis of the data element identification is not numbers, but meaningful names. The problem of relating names in different languages is handled in a neat way by a 'standard language la-bel' which cannot be described here. 6. The names used are standardised by using a standard Data Dictionary for each transaction [5]. This is built electronically from EDIFACT tred, trcd, trcl and the appropriate EDIFACT message. The Data Dictionary is primarily intended for use across a machine-to-machine interface and also carries the semantic and granularity information. With further research it may be possible to build a standard Data Dictionary to cover an entire business/informa-tion system scenario, but small steps usually succeed where grandiose strategies fail. Here we need to collaborate with the BSR project to avoid re-inventing the wheel. 7. Whenever new functionality needs to be added to a transaction which involves additional data elements, the new data elements are added to all the involved trading partners' dictionaries and to the interchange structure via an ICSDEF message. This is also the reason why numbers cannot be used to identify data elements. The overall objective in building up the approach in this way is to enable it …