XML Alone is not Sufficient for Effective WebEDI
Fábio Ghignatti Beckenkamp, Wolfgang Pree · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2006
WebEDI relies on the Internet infrastructure for exchanging documents among companies. Typically these documents are orders and invoices and can be exchanged by directly integrating the companies’ ERP systems or via Web application upload, download or typing of documents. XML is considered as a state-of-the-art way to reduce the complexity of managing the different data formats. Nevertheless, the XML standard alone does not offer the required semantics. When integrating a few companies, it is possible to hard code the semantics in the applications that process the documents. However, when integrating numerous different companies such a solution does not scale. The semantics has to be captured in a more flexible and scalable way. To cope with this necessity, simple ontologies are required to augment the data description.