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UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR EUROPE |
| UN/ECE NEWS |
Press Release ECE/TRADE/00/13
Geneva, 19 September 2000
Language for E-Commerce
in the 21st Century
Drawn up in Taipei
Two standards are now being used for the electronic transmission of commercial data. UN/EDIFACT - the international standard elaborated under the aegis of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) and applied worldwide - and ANSI ASC X121 a North American standard used mainly within the United States. Both groups whose language is being used by more than 500,000 companies throughout the world decided at a meeting in Taipei last week to join forces and prepare a common language for the 21st century.
Imagine that you get 1,000 e-mails every day and that a fast response to these e-mails is a key to your business. How will you solve this business requirement? The only effective answer is using electronic data interchange. Take, for instance, the business object address of an e-mail message. Is this an electronic address, a postal address, the address of a port etc.? The only way to communicate effectively is to agree worldwide on the meaning and use of this business object. By providing these standard business objects and effective solutions to allow companies and countries to build capacity by joining the electronic international supply chain, UN/EDIFACT works towards a free and fair global trading system where everybody stands to gain.
The initiative taken last week in Taipei will enable the users of UN/EDIFACT and of ASC X12 to continue using decades of investments in these two languages with the Internet technology. "The risk was that a new language would be developed, thus obliging the users of the 10-year old UN/EDIFACT and the 20-year old ASC X12 to dump all they have done during these years and start anew" says Pierre Georget, UN/EDIFACT Working Group Chair2 "This agreement will ensure that with a limited number of adaptations the huge work which has gone into both standard dictionaries will not be wasted".
It will also secure that the standards used to trade nationally and internationally are the same, as this is an important issue for countries in other economic regions. Furthermore, by joining the resources, the single set of business objects would be cheaper, easier to implement and therefore affordable to all. As such, the initiative is a direct contribution to the reduction of technical barriers to trade.
The Joint Initiative between ANSI ASC X12 and UN/EDIFACT will be fully compatible with the ebXML3 framework for new Internet languages that is being developed.
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1 ANSI Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12, Chair David R. Barkley, Vice Chair Ralph Berwanger
2 UN/CEFACT EDIFACT Working Group
3 Electronic Business with XML
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For further information please contact:
Mr. Jean Kubler
Electronic Business Team
Trade Division
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
Palais des Nations, Room 427
CH - 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Tel: (+41 22) 917 27 74
Fax: (+41 22) 917 00 37
E-mail: jean.kubler@unece.org
Website: http://www.unetrades.net
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