An Evaluation of Mapping Strategies for Core Components

Electronic data interchange (EDI) is inevitable in enabling successful collaborations between different business partners. Exchanging information electronically requires standardized formats for information exchange. There exist a variety of standards including bottom-up standards as well as top-down standards. However, business partners may utilize different standards resulting in a loss of interoperability. To cope with the variety of standardized formats we propose the approach of mapping these formats to the common concept of core components introduced by the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT). We evaluate the applicability of different strategies for mapping an arbitrary XML Schema based standard to core components by the example of ebInterface, an Austrian invoicing standard. The evaluation provides evidence that mapping of arbitrary standards to core components indeed provides substantial benefit in leveraging the interoperability between different business document standards.