Standardization of business-to-business electronic exchanges

This paper is a review of the history of business-to-business exchanges (e-business) from the perspective of standardization. The starting point is EDI (electronic data interchange), which has continued to thrive even as Web applications have increased their popularity. We then discuss the various approaches to assure EDI security on open networks, because they are gradually displacing private networks for transport. We also discuss the various ways for migrating existing EDI applications to new interfaces based on XML (extensible markup language) and web service. Finally, we give an assessment of the evolution of e-business standardization.