EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the exchange of information between trading partners in which the information is formatted according to a set of common data format standards developed in the U.S. and Western Europe during the late 1970th. EDI standards define the vocabulary, syntax rules, and structure of electronic documents.
X12 is an EDI standard from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 develops and maintains the X12 standards. In the X12 standard, a transaction set contains the data for a well defined business function (for example, a purchase order). Today, there are more than three hundred X12 transaction sets used by more than thirty thousand organizations for nearly every facet of business-to-business operations.