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Electronic Data Interchange

An -company, application-to-application communication of data in standard format for business transactions, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of standards for structuring information that is to be electronically exchanged between and within businesses, organizations, government entities and other groups. The standards describe structures that emulate documents, for example purchase orders to automate purchasing. The term EDI is also used to refer to the implementation and operation of systems and processes for creating, transmitting, and receiving EDI documents.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology in a 1996 publication defines Electronic Data Interchange as "EDI is the computer-to-computer interchange of strictly formatted messages that represent documents other than monetary instruments. EDI implies a sequence of messages between two parties, either of whom may serve as originator or recipient. The formatted data representing the documents may be transmitted from originator to recipient via telecommunications or physically transported on electronic storage media." It goes on further to say that "In EDI, the usual processing of received messages is by computer only. Human intervention in the processing of a received message is typically intended only for error conditions, for quality review, and for special situations. For example, the transmission of binary or textual data is not EDI as defined here unless the data are treated as one or more data elements of an EDI message and are not normally intended for human interpretation as part of on-line data processing." Kantor, Michael; James H. Burrows (1996-04-29). ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE (EDI). National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved on 2008-05-13.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) can be formally defined as 'The transfer of structured data, by agreed message standards, from one computer system to another without human intervention'. Most other definitions used are variations on this theme. Despite being relatively unheralded, in this era of technologies such as XML web services, the Internet and the World Wide Web, EDI is still the data format used by the vast majority of electronic commerce transactions in the world.