There are a number of data transmission standards involved in EDI. Click on a standard below to get more information.

EDIFACT
UCS
X12

X12

Standards defining the structure, format, and content of business transactions conducted through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). ANSI X12 is produced by the committee ASC X12, supported by the Data Interchange Standards Association, Inc (DISA). X12 refers to the documents exchanged as Transaction sets. Message structures are made up of segments and loops. X12 data within a message, must appear in the order presented in the message structure definition. X12 data is transmitted in packages referred to as interchanges. The interchange is the outermost layer of a hierarchical grouping of data. Each of the major layers is bounded by special segments known as envelope segments. All enveloping structure segments are required. If there are multiple transaction sets of the same type, they can be sent within the same functional group. There may be multiple functional groups within a single interchange.

In X12, most non-alphabetic, non-numeric characters can be used as separator characters. The separator characters used within a given interchange are determined by the characters used in the ISA segment. Unlike EDIFACT, the standard makes no provision for a release character. Therefore, separator characters must never be used as data characters.