The Extensible Markup Language - New Opportunities in the Area of EDI

Only about 5% of the companies which could profit from EDI actually use it. Th e main reason is that especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) try to avoid the considerable setupand operating costs of traditional EDI solutions. We demonstrate how new emerging network technologies such as XML and Java can open communications networks and shape the way businesses can interact with one another. Together with our partner Lufthansa AirPlus we developed an XML-based WebEDI solution that aims at lowering setup and running costs, opening EDI networks to SMEs and enabling more dynamic business partnerships. The XML-based architecture of the solution makes a simple support of different standards possible. In a very efficient and flexible way any transaction content can be altered and adapted to different needs because semantics and structure are no longer hard-coded part of the application but of the exchanged XML-document. The Extensible Markup Language New opportunities in the area of EDI