Frontiers of electronic commerce
Frontiers of electronic commerce
The XML Companion
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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 process of generation of destination files. This knowledge is transformed into a meta data structure represented by XML document type definitions (DTD) which itself are 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 within the XML DTDs. 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 using the advantages of XML and Internet technology.