Contribution to the design and realization of an EDIFACT machine.

Summary One of the current goals of information technology is to move towards the paperless office. One of these branches called edi (electronic data interchange) is standardized within the United Nations under the name edifact. Data is exchanged within messages. The standard provides a language for describing these messages. We could see by questioning the industrial and commercial world that the exchange of commercial information in a standardized form was a need of industries and administrations, but there are no simple and universal systems to date allowing to meet this need. Our purpose is to design a communication system based on edifact. This system includes two types of edifact machines: a user station and a processing center, and uses communication networks. The open communication part requires the definition of a virtual network. We propose on this virtual network a multi-traffic communication protocol. The user station must be user-friendly (ease of use, reconfiguration of the message according to the data used), capable of understanding and integrating all types of messages. For this purpose we describe a superset of the document description language allowing to integrate these constraints. The processing center serves as a communication center and information server. All information circulating in the system is in edifact form. To avoid transformation problems we have defined an information base and its queries in edifact.