Author List: Moore, Scott A.;

Information Systems Research, 2001, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page 34.

With the current stampede toward electronic commerce, businesses no longer have the luxury of setting up trading-partner-specific communication systems. Businesses want to communicate and do business with people and companies with whom they have not had any prior contact. They also want to build more extensive linkages with their best trading partners and in their outsourcing relationships. Companies have built these links using electronic data interchange (EDI). EDI cannot be implemented easily, quickly, or inexpensively, and is therefore inappropriate for many companies and people to adopt. An application based on the technologies proposed in this paper would have, already built in, a certain capability for understanding messages plus a flexibility that would allow the system to grow with few restrictions provided by the underlying communication system. The benefit is that almost any message that is structured correctly can be handled to some extent further, more complex message handling for new messages can be defined incrementally.

Keywords: Agent Communication Language; EDI; Formal Communication