Meta Data Based EDI for Small Enterprises

Abstract

Today in many cases electronic data interchange 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 the knowledge about data structures and data formats from the process of the generation of destination files. This knowledge is transformed into a meta data structure which is stored within a database system. If any changes of the data interchange specification are necessary, it is sufficient to update the corresponding meta data information. The implementation of the data interchange processor remains unchanged. This type of adaptation does not require a software specialist and therefore it meets an important requirement of small-scale enterprises. Data transmission is done by using Internet technology.