EDI-an overview

The increasing convergence of computing and telecommunications has opened up a wealth of opportunities in the field of information technology. Three fundamental trends can be discerned to underline developments: technical processes become faster and cheaper to obtain, the application of processes is widening in scope and there is a movement towards the integration of processes. EDI enables data to flow between divergent application systems efficiently and therefore, can be perceived as a repository of all three trends in the area of information exchange. There are many aspects to this area. EDI currently encompasses some of them, but not all. However, there is, in principle, no reason why there should not be a single uniform approach to the representation of the information and its transfer mechanism. The emergence of Pedi, which specifies procedures for the carriage of EDI messages over the X.400 protocols, is a case in point. There are three key issues pertinent to integration in information exchange: data interchange standards, communications media and business/manufacturing processes