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Implementation of Ediaudit on a data certification server

 
Amin   Elsaleh
  Managing Director
  VANEDI Ltd.
10, rue de Fontenay
Bourg-La-Reine   France  92340
Phone: +33 1 41 13 83 33
Fax: +33 1 46 65 20 94
Email: AminElsaleh@compuserve.com
 
Biographical notice:
 
Amin Elsaleh
 
  • "Docteur Es Science", University of Paris VI, 1973
  • Research and Development in Modelling Techniques, 1973-1980
  • Implementation of management systems, 1980-1987
  • Editor of standards ASMO449 and ISO 8859/6, 1982-1987
  • Project manager at STERIA, 1987-1990
  • Area manager at TRANSPAC, 1990-1991
  • EDI consultant, 1991-1993
  • VANEDI managing director, 1993-1998
  • French SGML User Group Vice president, 1997-1998
 Bourg-La-Reine  
Crisafulli, Paolo
EDIAUDIT Ltd.
 France  
 
Paolo   Crisafulli
  Research and design Engineer
  EDIAUDIT Ltd.
70, Bd du Marechal JOFFRE
Bourg-La-Reine   France  92340
Phone: +33 1 41 13 83 33
Fax: +33 1 46 65 20 94
Email: paolo_crisafulli@yahoo.com
 
Biographical notice:
 
Paolo Crisafulli
 
  • Graduate of the French "Ecole Polytechnique" (1995) and the "Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications" (ENST, 1997)
  • Research on multimedia : image generated musical scores.
  • Responsible of the development of the EDIAUDIT tool.
 
ABSTRACT:
 
The implementation of EDIAUDIT tool on a data certification server is based on the bridging concept between EDI  (Electronic Data Interchange) and SGML  (Standard Generalised Markup Language) . This enables the control of interdependency rules which might exist between data and provides additional features for securing business transactions.
 
 certification 
 

CERTIFICATION CONCEPT AND VALUE ADDED SERVICES

 interchange 
 
Since EDI is an interchange between applications, and despite the existence of the interchange agreement between a Sender and a Recipient, each application should be able to handle the message version which is prescribed in the agreement, the message is usually a subset which may use some dedicated codes and a minimum of data and segments in the message which are mandatory.
 certification  
 server 
value-added
 
Certification is necessary to guarantee that an application which sends or receives EDI messages is in conformance with the message specifications (version). One of the basic functions of an EDI value-added server is to certify applications used by its Subscribers, in order to guarantee that there's no misuse of the message flow.
integrity
 interchange 
 
The experience showed that certification procedures aren't sufficient, and that a User might modify his application after being certified, and even if he's not doing that, he might change some data values with no respect of some predefined rules.
 semantics 
 syntax 
 
Globally we call these rules: Semantic rules, and we can define a message as being a set of Syntax and Semantics.
 internet 
 
EDI Tools such as Translators or Converters are able to control the Syntax, but not Semantics which are very important for message handling. These Semantic rules are usually interdependency rules between Data elements within a message, the relation might be between two Data inside a segment, or between a certain Data in a given occurrence of a segment and another Data which belongs to another segment occurrence. Now a special case of these Semantics may be used for securing the message from Intruders, especially if we use Internet as a Carrier.
 interchange  
 
The primary objective of EDIAUDIT tool is to offer a Control Mechanism to be implemented on a Data certification Server. But other objectives have emerged after producing the first prototype, which is today used in an advanced version to control the 'Expertise Report' within the Insurance Sector, for which we may enumerate one hundred semantic rules, which means that this message type is fully controlled from any type of incidents.
archiving
 
The other objectives are mainly message archiving in a durable format, since the General Direction of Taxes in any Country has the right to consult an Electronic Archive a couple of years after using messages. The standard which may guarantee Archive durability is SGML (Standard Generalised Mark Up Language).
 multimedia 
 
The originality of the proposed tool is that it's based on two Standards applied in the Interchange business. One of its characteristics also is to handle Multiformat Object types in addition to EDI standards (EDIFACT, ANSI X12..etc) such as WORD documents, EXCEL tables, and image standards. This enable the right positioning of our tool in the Electronic Commerce different areas. The following schemas will clarify more EDIAUDIT architecture, and its positioning within Information Flow.
bridging
 security 
 
Finally, this tool will contribute to enhance the quality of service offered by a Value Added Server and secure Commercial transactions mainly when using Internet and with no need to data encryption in most cases. Its capacity of interfacing to databases is an additional feature of openness. The bridging between EDI and SGML implemented in our tool will enlarge its application domain and allow the durability of information storage.
 
 

General presentation of the EDIAUDIT tool
 
What we call EDIAUDIT and intend to realise for our customers is the structure and corresponding software that is described in figure .
 database 
interface
 multimedia 
scenario
 
As it is described there, EDIAUDIT is fundamentally an interface between a dynamic multimedia documentary fund and its users, through a federation under the SGML (Standard Generalised Mark-up Language) standard of documents description.
  • We call "dynamic multimedia documentary fund" a database of multimedia folders which administration must leave a chronological trace: it must be possible at all time to obtain a report on the evolution of the folder (is it complete or are we expecting for some more documents that must be claimed - automatically or not ? etc.) and to complete some automatic processing of the folders, according to what we call "scenari", which are predefined successions of data interchange between the users, e.g. during a payment transaction. Scenari also include fundamental information which is: who are the users allowed to access the data. What we described here lies in the left part of Figure .
  • The clients for EDIAUDIT (right part of the schema) can access the documentary fund through internal connections (typically intranet) or any kind of external connection and examine, use or modify the contents of both the multimedia folders or the generic scenari that are attached to them and the way they are being fulfilled for a particular folder.
  • The SGML standard which we are using adds great value: it allows clients to use a wide range of management tools associated to this standard and guarantees the perenniality of the documents stocked under this format: XML will replace HTML, but SGML , their father, remains. Thanks to SGML , EDIAUDIT is a standard federator: any kind of tree-structured text document can be described with the SGML formalism (our experience so far has been with EDI messages). Furthermore, SGML allows to include documents of any format at any level of the tree-structure of a text document. It is therefore a natural candidate to describe and manage multimedia structured documents.
  • Our tool is able to perform a real-time conversion of the SGML format of the multimedia folder to any required format: typically, it can produce a HTML version (or later a XML version) of the folder when some user wants to visualise it on a web server.
 HTML, Hypertext Markup Language  
 intranet 
perenniality
 
At this point of our general description, EDIAUDIT appears to be able to fulfil the following missions:
  • being an end-to-end interface between a multimedia database and its different users;
  • managing the dynamic functioning of this database and the access rights of the users, through a scenario management;
  • federating standards of description of structured multimedia-data.
    •  
    It also provides some other important specific features:
    • the data transmission which EDIAUDIT is designed for offers intrinsic security. The components of a multimedia folder can be sent through different media and at a different time for each component. A possible intruder will therefore be faced with an apparently incoherent and disconnected information flow. All the value of this information will be contained in the description of the multimedia links between the elements of the information flow: this description should be transmitted through the most secured communication channel.
    • finally, a reduced and cheap version of EDIAUDIT can be used as a black-box of data certification by SMEs, during their emission phase towards a multimedia server: this small black-box checks inter-document and inter-data rules conformity to the standard defined by the server, in order to alleviate the server from performing those tests and avoid its asking for reemission of the invalid data.

     SME 
     security 
     server  
     
    Figure 1

     
     
     certification 
     server 
     

    Basic functions of EDIAUDIT on a data certification server
     insurance 
     
    An existing version of EDIAUDIT is the one we are going to describe here (see Figure 2) : some French insurance companies use a proprietary EDI standard for their communication with a large number of SMEs (of two or three people), which are experts in the analysis of client claims. The exchanged data are reports describing the evolution of those analysis, which must verify some semantic rules, such as date coherence, or content dependent structure of the message. In the future, those reports should also include multimedia data, such as photographs of a damage or recording of phone calls, etc.
    conformity
     
    Here is the architecture we are implementing on the data certification server of those insurance companies, in order to fulfil the following tasks: test of the syntactic data conformity to the standard of exchange, production of an SGML version of the messages, test of the semantic rules, archiving in fair or corrupt data folders, automatic production of a data-interchange report.

     
    Figure 2

     
     
    The data to process can be divided into three sets: the EDI message itself, the description of the multimedia links and the multiformat data.
    • The first step is the reconstitution of the multimedia parcel: the server waits until all the elements described in the multimedia links message reach the server. It then produces the SGML expression of this message, which is the beginning of the SGML description of the future multimedia folder.
    • The second step is the conversion of the EDI message to a SGML format, with a simultaneous test of its syntactic conformity. This is one of the powerful characteristics of SGML : many SGML parsers exist, even freeware ones, which are able to test the conformity of a document with regard to what is called a Document Type Definition (DTD).
    • Once this step is over, the multimedia folder itself is complete. But we still need to test the coherence of the content of the transmitted text data. This step illustrates another powerful feature of the SGML format: its easiness as regards access to data. Navigating and extracting the useful data on which semantic tests have to be performed is particularly easy.
    • The last step is the automatic production of a transmission report, which will specify if the multimedia folder is complete, if the EDI message syntax is correct and if the data it contains is semantically coherent.
     
     conversion 
     

    CONCLUSION
     
    The principal characteristics of Value Added Network EDI Services which should extend the simple idea of message administration, some hot line services and EDI consultancy, are still not sufficiently explored in Europe and USA; we may point out to:
    1. certification of applications which generate EDI messages,
    2. exploitation of statistics which are generated by the message flow for the benefit of subscribed users,
    3. durability of message archiving.
    		durability
     statistics 
     
     
    The relationship between certification and the good practice of standards is obvious, certification guarantees the respect of Standards and the applicability of an interchange agreement. This is the first reason of producing the EDIAUDIT tool. Statistics are widely used by Insurance companies in France. Archiving is mandatory for processing of INVOICES in electronic forms.
     
    But there's another requirement formulated by Insurance companies in France, regarding their visibility of the evolution of an accident claim folder, which content may include Textual reports, images in addition to EDI messages: this is called multimedia EDI .
     
    All of these requirements conducted us to elaborate a hybrid technology by bridging two standards: EDI and SGML . The first experimentation of the resulting tool "EDIAUDIT" was on the Insurance certification server in France.
     
    We may conclude that there exists a strong relationship between Standards, Certification and Value added services.
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