EDIFACT

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

UN/EDIFACT is the international EDI standard developed under the United Nations. The acronym stands for United Nations/Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce, and Transport. The work of maintenance and further development of this standard is done through UN/CEFACT, the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business under the UN Economic Commission for Europe, in the Finance Domain working group UN CEFACT TBG5. EDIFACT has been adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the ISO standard ISO 9735. The EDIFACT standard:

Provides a set of syntax rules to structure data.
Provides an interactive exchange protocol (I-EDI)
Provides standard messages (allows multi-country and multi-industry exchange)

Two main organisations deal with EDIFACT:

TT&L (Travel Tourism And Leisure) - United Nations working group
PADIS (Passenger And Data Interchange Standard) - IATA and ATA working group

Defined in the IATA SSIM book chapter 8: EDIFACT messages are a common alternative to Teletype messages in the airline industry.

This is an example EDIFACT message used to answer to a product availability request:

UNB+IATB:1+6XPPC+LHPPC+940101:0950+1’
UNH+1+PAORES:93:1:IA’
MSG+1:45’
IFT+3+?*XYZCOMPANY AVAILABILITY?*’
ERC+A7V:1:AMD’
IFT+3+NO MORE FLIGHTS’
ODI’
TVL+240493:1000::1220+FRA+JFK+DL+400+C’
PDI++C:3+Y::3+F::1’
APD+74C:0:::6++++++6X’
TVL+240493:1740::2030+JFK+MIA+DL+081+C'
PDI++C:4’
APD+EM2:0:1630::6+++++++DA’
UNT+13+1’
UNZ+1+1’

' is a segment terminator
+ is a data element separator
: is a component data element separator
* is a repetition separator
? is a release character

UNH+1+PAORES:93:1:IA’- This is the header segment. It is required at the start of every message - this one specifies that the message name and version is PAORES 93 revision 1 and it was defined by the organisation IA (IATA).

IFT+3+NO MORE FLIGHTS’ - This is an 'Interactive Free Text' segment containing the text 'NO MORE FLIGHTS'

UNT+13+1’ - This is the tail segment. It indicated that the message sent contains 13 segments.

1 Structure
2 Current state of EDIFACT
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Structure

EDIFACT has a hierarchical structure. The top level element is referred to a message. A message is a sequence of groups and segments.

A group or segment can be mandatory (M) or conditional (C) and can be specified to repeat, for example C99 would indicate between 0 and 99 repetitions of a segment or group, whereas M99 would mean between 1 and 99 repetitions.

A group, like a message, is a sequence of segments or groups. The first segment/group beneath a group must be mandatory. If the logic of the situation demands it is conditional, then the group itself should be made conditional instead.

[edit] Current state of EDIFACT

It seems there is a battle between XML and EDIFACT - and XML is winning. An equivalent EDIFACT message will be smaller in size than an XML message but the XML message will be easier to read for a human. This has some benefits in practical application as developers from disparate companies attempt to establish automated communications and troubleshoot systems. Another possible explanation is that compatibility is being favored over performance, since more tools exist to work with XML data than with EDIFACT.

One of the emerging XML standards is RosettaNet, widely used in the semiconductor and high tech industry in general. Another is UBL, currently being adopted by Scandinavian governments as legal requirement to send invoices to governments. For example, all invoices to the Danish government have had to be in electronic format since February 2005.

However, EDIFACT is still widely used in the high tech, civil aviation and tourism industries and is likely to remain so for some time due to the amount of software making use of it and the need for newer systems to be able to integrate with legacy systems. Europe started early with adopting EDIFACT and therefore has a large installed base, where as for example the Asian region started later with B2B implementations and is therefore using more XML standards.