XML and EDI essays

XML and EDI essays The internet is analogous to a very large library where all the books are scattered on the floor. This is because it contains so much information, but there is no organizational system for sorting through the information. "Many people have expended a lot of time and effort over the years to try to put some order into this chaos but with varying degrees of success." (Wiseman 113). The eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, aims to take on the electronic clutter and organize it in a way that everyone can use. Although XML promises to bring drastic organizational changes to the internet, it is not a new concept. In fact, businesses have been using "a collection of standard message formats and element dictionaries to exchange data" for the past twenty-five years (Wiseman 114). This type of formatting for electronic commerce is called Electronic Data InterchangeEDIand has allows businesses to trade information necessary to their functioning. It is for this reason that XML has sometimes been called "the poor man's EDI" or "EDI for everyone," XML brings organization to the common man's electronic world, while EDI has structured corporate commerce since the dawn of the information age. EDI's foundations can be traced back to 1948 "during the Berlin airlift when Ed Guilbert of the Department of Defense spearheaded the Transportation Data Coordinating Committee." (Rifkin 29). This group needed to get various modes of transportation to share data like schedules and coordinate with each other to effectively deliver supplies. The establishment of this group eventually led to the formation of the X12 committee, which was accredited by the American National Standards institute in 1979. "Large petroleum, banking, transportation, and retailing companies and the federal government soon began using X12 EDI to provide electronic forms and messages for shipping...