On Lean Messaging with Unfolding and Unwrapping for Electronic Commerce

EDI (electronic data interchange) messages are notoriously lean and difficult (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 unwrapping 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 lean event semantics for speech acts, and Tan and Thoen’s theory of directed obligation can be fit 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.