At 07:50 PM 10/10/01, Emery Kobor wrote: >How do EDI and XML compare, byte for byte, and what adjustments >might have to be made for "financial XML" to replace "financial EDI?"
My hunch is that's an academic question since there would be insufficient economic incentive for a simple replacement of the document format using XML tags. XEDI is one example of that approach in the wider EDI community. The best site I've found is http://www.diffuse.org/standards.html --drill down into Ecommerce. The broader answer to your question involves these facts, 1. EDI never reached SMEs; has reached approx. 400,000 out of at least 50 million businesses and has no answer whatsoever to assist individual buying and selling. 2. Meanwhile, across ALL application domains, not just business, there has been a profound shift to XML as a simple syntax for passing data and for innumerable common processing functions. The runtime software is totally free and cross platform. 3. The XML vocabulary, syntax and all the necessary processing layers are certainly being standardized at http://www.ebtwg.org which is meeting this week. All readers of this list should have a look at the new workgroup structures for ebXML phase two. And the results of phase one at http://www.ebxml.org The IP that has been contributed to the mailing lists on EBTWG in the past 10 days on the mailing list is quite remarkable. All of OAGIS, EAN/UCC, Swift/Bolero, xCBL, etc. etc. This is quite remarkable, and the libraries are there in the lists as attachments for download. 4. The payment and settlement is something that happens in a larger business process, or you might say, transaction lifecycle. For example search,discovery,order,fulfillment,settlement. Settlement comes at the end of this process in which all of the party and product and logistical processes have already been done. Settling balances is almost trivially easy in comparison to the broader automation, security, and so forth that has already been done. Thus settlement solutions such as fEDI are *quite* unhelpful in isolation-- these technologies as well as the financial services industry itself, needs to be harmonized with the rest of the processing environment if they are to survive at all. The automation must reach back earlier in time, when the parties identify each other to each other, and conduct their business. I say this with some irony as the same thing is true of general ledgers, and the accounting industry. But if automation is to ever reach the SME and individual users, the whole business process needs to become much, much more efficient, encompassing the whole business process not just the payment, or the journalizing after the fact, Todd Todd Boyle CPA 9745-128th Ave NE Kirkland WA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 425-827-3107 Oslo [47] 9822-7366 my employer www.netaccount.com our project www.arapxml.net website www.gldialtone.com
