Meta Messages in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

The economic advantages of electronic data interchange (EDI) are widely recognized. Nevertheless, the number of organisations and companies employing EDI is relatively small compared to the total number of businesses worldwide. The huge difference is caused by the fact that current EDI standards include a lot of complexity and their integration into existing applications is too expensive. This is due to the fact that current EDI standard messages are based on data models intended to capture all data that may appear in any business document of the corresponding business transaction. Business partners have to specify within a trading partner agreement a subset of the standard message which reflects their actual need before they are able to run an EDI partnership. Therefor, EDI should move to the meta level. The basic idea is that the concept of EDI is used for an agreement on the subset. Therefore, a meta message that is able to capture all the semantics in a trading partner agreement is needed. We demonstrate feasibility and advantages of a meta message approach by the example of the EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport) standard.