> > I wonder if it's similar in the financial and medical industries, but > with us the fixed record format is not the thing that's standardized but > some binary format I've never seen,
Sensible interoperability councils adopted text format for easier validation -- both Mk 1 Eyball checks and using diff(1) to compare test-output to expected-test-output -- but no doubt some have opted for bit packing efficiency, possibly for the wrong reasons. > handling of which is the domain of a > specialized company known as an "EDI Provider." Would it be cynical to > think the standardization in these areas is driven as much by > rent-seeking as by interoperability? Cause it sounds like a sweet > deal. Yes indeed, but it varies with the foresight/power-dynamics of the consortium/council. In Finance in the last dozen years, i dealt with two standards mongers that avoided extremes. * SWIFT is a member-owned, non-profit which is both the standards body and the EDI Provider. An accounting VP down the hall from me was our firm's Board member. They provide value-add by managing the crypto key distribution and leased lines; providing a central switching location allows members to have easier time getting secure transmission to new counterparties and delivering to counterparties' DR sites securely and agilely. And as a non-profit co-op, they're rent-seeking only to the extent that organizations have innate desire to continue and expand, but that's checked by the customers being the owners. * X3 EDI-INT AS community, where the rent-seeker is the standards committee secretariat, trainer, and judge of the annual interoperability certification, but they do NOT interpose themselves on each transmissions as a provider. Commercial B2B MFT (managed file transfer) products conforming to AS1/2/3 can be bought by banks, investment managers, and brokers who can then exchange transactions point-to-point over VPN over any links available, and commercial Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) ETL tools can translate from EDI standard form to in-house proprietary form and back. Some transaction types have Providers interposed, but only where they provide added value e.g. Matching Affirms and Confirms from all counter-parties, avoiding N^2 connectivity requirements. http://www.drummondgroup.com/index.php/component/content/article/127-b2b/b2b-products/b2b-faqs/243-as4-faq All three of SWIFT, EDI-INT, ACORD started as tagged text formats but have evolved XML versions of their message format standards. Not all text formats are record length, some are varying with Tag:Data style; those can be even worse to parse without parser tools ! Did you know ISO allows committees to request 'vanity' numbers for Standards? SWIFT ISO-20022 is the update to ISO-15022. A part of adopting new software for energy retailers always seems > to involve a contract for one of these entities. I doubt they're doing > anything in these four month contracts that Uri couldn't whip up in a > week or so. But since such companies seem chosen based on > recommendations from other people in industry, I'm not sure there'd be > any way in for an outsider, however technically trivial what they do > might be. > And the NDAs will prevent an outsider getting the needed information to do it at all or using it if they get it. -- Bill @n1vux [email protected] _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
