EDIFACT
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
EDIFACT stands for Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport. EDIFACT is an international standard provided by ISO 9735 (created in 1986):
- 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+1APPC+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++++++1A’ 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
Current State of EDIFACT
It seems there is a battle between XML and EDIFACT and XML is winning. There doesn't seem to be a technical reason why XML is superior. XML is just a bit of a buzzword at the moment (2003-2005). An equivalent EDIFACT message will be smaller in size to an XML message but the XML message will be easier to read for a human (but whats a human doing trying to read an EDIFACT message?).
