Unstructured documents in EDIFACT

: A survey of the inclusion of unstructured documents in the EDIFACT standard, with an introduction to CALS

Abstract

This work studies the inclusion of so-called unstructured documents in an EDI standard, the EDIFACT international standard in particular. We will show that the notion of business documents, as known in EDI, needs to widen in order to encompass all sorts of documents exchanged amongst companies, notably including technical documents. Indeed EDI is traditionally thought as a commercial or administrative exchange but EDI can and must be enhanced to include other documents. In the process we will review CALS (Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support), a US DoD initiative popular for technical data exchange. A significant part of this work is dedicated to an introduction to the various CALS standards. In the end, we will see how to include the techniques developed by CALS in EDIFACT.

Date of Award	1994
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Philippe Van Bastelaer (Supervisor)