EDI standards-bearer sees XML writing on the wall

Orlando

For a quarter-century, electronic data interchange standards for purchase orders and other documents have been the basis for electronic commerce between large businesses. But last week, the official U.S. EDI standards-bearer, the Data Interchange Standards Association (DISA), said traditional ANSI X12 EDI is likely to be replaced by a newer Web-oriented technology called Extensible Markup Language (XML). Among other things, XML is expected to make life easier for small companies to do business electronically.

One looming issue, though, is whether XML, approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will be backward-compatible with existing EDI technology.

"There are a lot of synergies between XML and EDI," said DISA President Judy Kilpatrick, speaking here at the organization's annual convention. "We're not sure, though, if you can encode an XML transaction as EDI, or take the semantics around EDI and put them into XML Data Type Definitions. We have high hopes we can take advantage of all the work that's gone into EDI."

XML is a language that can be used to write format-neutral documents containing structured data. The XML specification was approved just last month as a W3C standard, and products are now beginning to appear that will let companies process XML forms or database searches via the World Wide Web. DISA has joined with the government-funded CommerceNet Consortium to determine just how compatible XML will be with EDI technology.

By July, the results of this investigation should be in, said Rik Drummond, president of The Drummond Group, a Fort Worth, Texas, consultancy contributing technical expertise to the effort. But early indications are that substantial barriers to XML/EDI compatibility exist, he said.

For example, the ANSI X12 EDI structure lets users program "if/then loops" in business logic. But this is something XML cannot yet do, Drummond said. "Loops in X12 are important, and XML doesn't yet solve that common business problem," he said. XML may prove fine for electronic catalogs, but not for more complex EDI processes.

Nevertheless, the ANSI Ac-credited Standards Committee (ASC) X12, which coordinates EDI standards development under DISA, wants to get out of the business of writing EDI standards. "We're repositioning the X12 committee to incorporate EDI with all the other [electronic commerce] technologies, such as XML, Java and data mining," said Kendra Martin, ASC X12 chairwoman and manager of electronic commerce at The American Petroleum Institute. "A lot of our older EDI transaction sets are just electronic versions of paper documents," Martin said. "We need to think more about business modeling."

The ASC X12 committee "is no longer going to be concerned about application-level syntax," Martin said. "We're going to get out of the technology business and let people whose business it is get on with [the technology development]."

"There are a lot of electronic commerce vendors out there who have never heard of EDI," said ASC X12 Vice Chairman Charley Quirt, network manager at Datex-Ohmeda, a Tewksbury, Mass., medical equipment supplier. "We want to find the appropriate bridges from current EDI to the future."

One cultural problem is that EDI users and their familiar software and service providers are not among the parties driving XML. Rather, it is the likes of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that are behind XML's rise.

The XML/EDI Group was founded in July to help bridge the gap between the old and new technologies. To date, the 400-member organization has been active mainly as a discussion group on the Web at www. hmledi.com.