Comparison between EDIFACT and X.12

Comparison between EDIFACT and X.12:

References: Wikipedia and www.edpipeline.com
X.12:
American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1979 developed a common set of standards for inter-industry electronic exchange of business transactions ie. for the electronic data interchange (EDI) which was named ”ANSI ASC X.12” . ASC stands for Accredited Standard Committee. The whole acronym ANSI ASC X.12 stands for "American National Standards Institute Accredited Standards Committee X12". Here the designation of X.12 is only a sequential designator assigned by ANSI at the time of accreditation.

Not surprisingly, it was not well accepted in Europe as a standard for EDI transactions as X.12 only recognized US Dollar as the currency for trade.

UN/EDIFACT:
So it was in 1986 when the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) approved the acronym "UN/EDIFACT”. It stands for United Nations Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport.
It was actually an extension from X.12 with provision to exchange credits in other European currencies and to meet the needs of both government and private industry.
UN/EDIFACT is developed and maintained by UN/EDIFACT Working Group or EWG, a permanent working group of United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT).

Mapping between EDIFACT and X.12:. All though both ANSI X.12 and UN/EDIFACT are the two recognized standards for EDI, The UN/EDIFACT is an international standard that will most likely be adopted by US companies. An EDI document is called a "Transaction Set" in ANSI X.12, and is called a "Message" in UN/EDIFACT. X.12 might be still in use in the USA but most of the world uses UN/EDIFACT transaction sets.

A partial list of the most popular transaction sets is given below:

TRANSACTION SET/DOCUMENT ANSI X.12 EDIFACT

PRODUCT/PRICING TRANSACTIONS

Price Sales Catalog 832 PRICAT

Price Authorization and acknowledgement status 845 ATHSTS

Request For Quotation 840 REQOTE

Response to Request for Quotation 843 QUOTES

Part of the assignment on Web2.0

Q2 .How can Web 2.0 help E-Commerce?
Answer:
With the introduction of Web 2.0, the true concept of E-Commerce has come in practice and E-commerce is getting admiration world wide as a powerful media of trade with options for a lot of interactive trade operations.
Some effect of Web 2.0 on E-Commerce is mentioned below:

Web 2.0 sites are all about more interaction with your visitors/customers:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a feature of Web 2.0. It is a standard format to pass information (like HTML). RSS provides the means for Web contents to be available for “feeding” (distribution or syndication) from an online publisher to consumers. Latest browser version provides RSS feeders/readers what let’s the subscriber know if any thing new is posted on those RSS feeds of any site. There is no need to go back to the site to check updates. The traffic for the site, user acceptance and popularity of an E-Commerce website can be increased by just entering the URL of other sites for RSS feeds that the users/customers may be interested in.

Allows users of social bookmarking websites to share links with other users and friends:
Web 2.0 provides the option for social bookmarking. Social bookmarking allows the web publishers and users to store tagged pages on the web and lets them to be accessed from any computer. This way a user of a web site using feature shares links with other users and friends.
Some examples of social bookmarking sites:del.icio.us, Furl.net, RawSugar, BackFlip ,BlinkList .
An owner of an E-Commerce web site that hasn’t yet been ranked by the popular search engine Google can place their links on this highly ranked social bookmarking sites.