EDI Glossary

ANSI Acronym for the American National Standards Institute.

ANSI standard A document published by ANSI that has been approved through the consensus process of public announcement and review. Each of these standards must have been developed by an ANSI committee and must be revisited by that committee within five years for update.

ANSI ASC X12 The Accredited Standards Committee X12 comprises government and industry members from north America who create EDI draft standards for submission to ANSI.

CDATA A declaration inside an XML document that prevents any character data inside the CDATA section from being interpreted as XML markup language.

Data Element The basic unit of information in the EDI standards containing a set of values that represents a singular fact. It may be a single-character code, a literal description, or a numeric value. Examples of a data element are: price, product code and product attribute such as size or color.

Data Element Separator A unique character preceding each data element that is used to delimit data elements within a data segment.

Data Element Type A data element may be one of six types: numeric, decimal, identifier, string, data or time.

Data segment A well-defined string of alternating data elements and data element separators. The electronic equivalent of a line item on a business form.

Delimiters These consist of two levels of separators and a terminator. the delimiters are an integral part of the transferred data stream. Delimiters are specified in the interchange header and may not be used in a data element value elsewhere in the interchange. From the highest to lowest level, the separators and terminator are segment terminator, data element separator and subelement separator.

Document A block of information which composes an EDI transaction.

Direct Transmission The exchange of data from the computer of the sending party directly to the computer of the receiving party. A third party value added service is not used in a direct transmission code.

EDI The standard abbreviation for Electronic Data Interchange. a format in which business data is represented using national or international standards.

EDIFACT Electronic Document Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transportation. "UN" was added to EDIFACT to indicate messages are approved by the United nations international standards for EDI.

EDI translation The conversion of application data to and from an EDI standard format.

Electronic Commerce Transacting business via electronic means.

Electronic Data Interchange The computer transfer of business transactions using industry standard message formats.

Electronic Envelope Catch-all term for the electronic address, communications transport protocols, and control information. It is the electronic analogy of a paper envelope, i.e. a communications package.

Electronic Envelope The place where EDI transmission is stored for pickup or delivery within a third party service provider's system. Trading partners can also maintain mailboxes within their own domain.

Flat File A computer file where all the information is run together in a single character string.

Functional Acknowledgment A message or transaction set transmitted by the receiver of an EDI transaction to the sender, indicating receipt and syntactical acceptability of data transmitted according to an EDI standard. The functional acknowledgement allows the receiving party to report back to the sending party problems encountered by the syntax analyzer as the data are interpreted. It is not intended to serve as an acknowledgement of data content.

Functional Group A group of one or messages or transaction sets bounded by a functional group header segment and a functional group trailer segment. It is a collection of electronic document information for the same business application.

HL7 Health Level 7

IDocs IDoc is a container that can be used to exchange data between any two processes. IDoc represents an IDoc type and IDoc data. IDocs are based on EDI standards, closer to EDIFACT standards than ANSIX12. IDoc format is compatible with most EDI standards.

Interchange The combination of header, trailer and other control segments that define the start and end of an individual EDI message.

Mapping The process of identifying the relationship of the EDI standard data elements to application software data elements.

Message The entire data stream including the outer envelope. (USA) The equivalent of transaction set in the USA. (International)

SAP Service Access Point

SEF Stands for Standard Exchange Format.

SMTP Acronym for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

Syntax The rules which define the structure of EDI standards.

Trading Partner The sender or receiver involved in the exchange of EDI transmissions.

Transaction set The transaction set defines, in the standard syntax, information of business or strategic significance. It consists of a transaction set header segment, one or more data segments in a specified order, and a transaction set trailer segment. (USA) Known as a message in EDIFACT. It is the electronic equivalent of a business document or business form. (International)

UN/EDIFACT See EDIFACT.

VAN Standard abbreviation for Value-Added Network.

Value Added Network A network that leases communication lines from a communications carrier and allows others to use this service for a fee.

XML Stands for eXtensible Markup Language.