XML/EDI: Issues, Ideas, Practical Constraints

Betty Harvey of Electronic Commerce Connection gave an informative talk that covered considerable ground. She began by pointing out that X12 EDI is used primarily by Fortune 500 companies and the US Government. eCommerce is greater than EDI. Yet X12 is only an American EDI standard and, even so, only 100,000 of 6 million companies have adopted it. SMEs (Small and Medium Sized enterprises) cannot afford the costly startup price. VANs (Value Added Networks) charge a setup fee and a per transaction charge. EDI is also complex, inflexible, and often requires special partner agreements. XML, on the other hand, has a lower entry cost and an easier on-ramp to work with the major EDI players. The European counterpart to X12 is EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport). Harvey suggested that when we write DTDs for EDI, we should be considering how common fragments of the DTDs can be shared. For example, a purchase order DTD, an invoice DTD, and a catalog DTD are all likely to have some common information about products. We can use stylesheets to extract the portion of XML that is relevant for a particular task. XLink can aid reuse by fostering the repository concept promoted by XML.org, BizTalk, and so many others.

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