A Query Language Enabling Inter-organizational Business Process Mining for EDIFACT Documents

For decades, EDIFACT has been a dominating standard in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Due to its wide industry coverage and long-standing establishment, EDIFACT continues to play an important role in Business-to-Business (B2B) e-commerce and presumably will do so for some time. Implementors of EDI systems are currently missing technologies and tools that facilitate the automated parsing and extraction of business data from EDIFACT documents. While XML has received much attention towards the development of powerful query languages and comprehensive tool support, no similar endeavors have been undertaken for EDIFACT yet. Hence, in this research proposal we envisage the development of a query language speci cally tailored to EDIFACT. Firstly, we intend to develop a mechanism for addressing and extracting data elements on a syntactical level. Secondly, by combining this mechanism with an ontological approach, we aim at delivering a sophisticated query language that operates on a conceptual level. With such a query language a user could extract and process business data from EDIFACT documents by using concept names in powerful query expressions, thereby reducing implementation efforts for EDI systems.