Semantic Interpretation of UN/EDIFACT Messages for Evaluating Inter-organizational Relationships

Electronic information exchange between business partners based on UN/EDIFACT messages directly reflects inter-organizational business performance, which is typically evaluated by management people. However, querying such messages results in an ambiguous task for management people due to the complex structure of EDIFACT formats. For this reason, we provide an ontology-based extraction framework for EDIFACT messages. The framework provides (i) business information concepts reflecting business performance, and enables (ii) the automated extraction of business data from EDIFACT messages by applying reasoning techniques. Having the framework at hand allows querying business information from EDIFACT messages based on business information concepts resulting in three distinct advantages: (i) the reduction of the complexity of querying tasks and the accessibility of business information, (ii) the querying of super- and sub-concepts, and (iii) the reduction of the search scope.