Ontologizing EDI: first steps and initial experience

Electronic data interchange (EDI) standards for transmission of business messages were promulgated in the 1970s. As standards became more complex to provide additional message types and variants, programmers and businesses started calling for simpler, semantically-enabled, systems; some even predicting traditional EDI's imminent demise. Numerous projects to create successor systems using XML were unable to stop traditional EDI's growth. DERI is taking a different approach: ontologizing EDI to allow the creation of semantically enabled messages, while being backward compatible with traditional systems. We argue that ontologizing syntax first enables automatic calculation of the intersection of message formats necessary for initiating new EDI partnerships as well as provides the groundwork for ontologizing message meanings.