On lean messaging with wrapping and unfolding for E-commerce

EDI (electronic data interchange) messages are notoriously lean and difficult to interpret without additional information. While sympathising with the many criticisms that have been made of the design of EDI protocols, we argue that there is something basically correct in the noted leanness of EDI messages. We present a framework that describes how interpretation of EDI messages works, and indeed must work. Central elements of this framework are what we call wrapping and unfolding of messages. We demonstrate hour to exploit these concepts an formalizations for electronic commerce. In particular, we show how Kimbough's event semantics for speech acts (1997) and Tan's theory of directed obligation (1998) can be fit naturally and fruitfully into this framework, and to each other. Much work remains to be done, but the progress in formalization in evidence should be generalizable.