1.13 The I-Commerce Gateways.

EDI is the exchange of documents in standardized electronic form, between organizations, in an automated manner, directly from a computer application in one organization to an application in another (Clarke 1998). EDI was introduced to facilitate inter-business transactions. However, early EDI systems were typically operated over special networks that are complex to set up and costly to administer. For these reasons, EDI has not been as widely deployed as expected (Chan, et al. 2001).