XML-based Integration of Information Systems and EDI in E-Commerce Applications of Small Enterprises

摘要

Today in many cases electronic data interchange (EDI) is limited to large scale industry connected to their own value added networks. Small-scale enterprises are not yet integrated in the communication flow, because actual EDI solutions are to complex, to inflexible or to expensive. The approach presented in this paper separates knowledge about data structures and data formats from the file generation process. This knowledge is transformed into a meta data structure represented by XML document type definitions (DTDs). If. any changes of the data interchange specification are necessary, it is sufficient to update the corresponding meta data information within the XML DTDs. The implementation of the data interchange processor remains unchanged. Due to the significantly reduced administration effort this approach meets the special requirements of small-scale enterprises. Data transmission is done making use of the advantages of XML and Internet technology.