How does the UDEF differ from data interchange standards such as STEP/PLCS and EDI?
There are many data interchange standards that are the basis of subject-area-specific information transfer syntaxes. A few examples are OAGIS, RosettaNet, STEP/PLCS, EIA-836, X12, EDIFACT, XBRL, and SWIFT. Unfortunately, there is substantial overlap and conflict between the various standards. For instance, each of the examples listed includes the concept of “address” but they do not use the same semantics. The UDEF is an indexing mechanism that is designed to enable information engineers to relate these standards to each other and to the intrinsic vocabularies used by the applications within each enterprise.
