The growing need for meta messages in electronic data interchange

The economic advantages of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) are widely recognized. Nevertheless, the number of total users is relatively small compared to the total business in the world. This is due to the fact that the costs for setting up and running an EDI relationship are to high for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Recently, new standardization efforts have been made to involve more SMEs in EDI. In this paper we pick up the idea of subsets with nearly null optionality as presented in Lite EDI. We distinguish standardized subsets as originally proposed by Lite EDI and subsets resulting from hubspoke-relationships. Furthermore, we show that transmitting these subsets via meta messages will reduce the complexity of EDI standards to an absolute minimum for SMEs.