Electronic Data Interchange

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Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of standards for electronically exchanging information between and within businesses, organizations, government entities and other groups. Work on the standards originated in the 1980's with the goal of enabling electronic inter-company purchasing systems over the newly emerging internet. EDI systems use ASN.1 messaging and are complex. Although still in use today, EDI as a technique has been largely superseded by more recent data interchange and distributed system technologies, including web services.

Some EDI systems, such as Health Level 7, first used unique formats, rather than ASN.1, but newer versions tend to be in XML.