The fundamental unit of trading in the electronic business world is a piece of electronic document. Be it a purchase order, a delivery order or an invoice document, the orderly and meaningful exchange of such documents is as important and fundamental in the electronic world as the equivalent in the real world. Notably, many disparate manner of representing business exchange information and of transporting such represented information exist in various parts of the world and in different industrial verticals. But with the rising prevalence and common acknowledgement that XML will become the global common language of data exchange, there is an urging need to look at all the available technologies, tools, practice, procedures, standards, trading styles, culture and many other factors and start looking seriously at how best to foster a better understood and more interoperable way of performing electronic data exchange. From the early days of SoftML, there is recognition of the importance of paying some attention to the abstraction of business trading models in the electronic business world. It was recognised that this is more than just a simple definition of data representation formats. A fair number of factors as disparate as those mentioned above appear to become rather intricately involved in the creation or identification of such business trading model. Beyond the obviously important electronic data interchange, there appears to be a need to do it expeditiously in a manner that can be cross-borders, cross-machines and cross-businesses. |
JEDI - Joining Electronic Document Intelligently - is a collective term under the initiative by SoftML to examine and develop areas related to making the interaction and interchanging of electronic document in a sufficiently intelligent manner so as to allow very effective and even automated electronic business trading to be possible. Admittedly, this is a rather high call to match, and honest to truth, we are not exactly certain what the final form could look and how this can be achieved. Nevertheless, we believe that by stating this JEDI initiative, we allow ourselves to look at all and every likely candidate component, be it technology, standards, industrial consortiums, etc, and evaluate, participate, develop and/or promote the components. By having a clear eventual goal, JEDI serves as a guiding principle with which we, and our working partners, will contribute to the world's business and trading communities a good platform for electronic business trading. Under the vision of JEDI, we look at the next concrete action level. The following areas are being looked at (in no particular order):
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