ASC X12

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ASC X12 (also known as ANSI ASC X12) is the official designation of the U.S. national standards body for the development and maintenance of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. The group was founded in 1979, and is an accredited standards committee under the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The acronym stands for "American National Standards Institute Accredited Standards Committee X12", with the designation of X12 being a sequential designator assigned by ANSI at the time of accreditation with no other significance.

ASC X12 has sponsored more than 315 X12-based EDI standards and a growing collection of X12 XML schemas for health care, insurance, government, transportation, finance, and many other industries. ASC X12's membership includes 3,000+ standards experts representing over 350 companies from multiple business domains.

[edit] CICA

CICA (or Context Inspired Component Architecture) is a new approach to message design aimed at resolving the costly proliferation of differing (and often incompatible) XML messages used for business-to-business data exchange. CICA gives developers access to reusable components that can be used to construct interface standards to satisfy common business requirements as well as industry-specific needs.

CICA is a syntax-neutral architecture that supports both business content and implementation information. CICA messages ("documents") can currently be expressed as XML schema.

CICA's reusable syntax-neutral message components are maintained in a central data store that supports a variety of functions including: data entry and maintenance, data retrieval (from full message structure to individual components), flexible reporting capabilities for development support, and end-user documents including XML schemas and user-friendly reference guides.

Complementing the CICA data store is the X12 CICA Metadata Interchange Format (CICA-MIF). The CICA-MIF is a structured guideline for the bi-directional exchange between X12 development tools, the central data store and other technology providers' software that supports the interchange format. This XML schema will enable X12 developers to use world-class commercial off-the-shelf tools to develop message standards for submission into the CICA database.