Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been used for business-to-business communication for almost a quarter of a century. Initial efforts Involved inter-company agreements on how to exchange commercial data, initially as information stored on tape and later as messages sent over dedicated data lines. To avoid having to use different protocols to move data between different companies, various Industry groups identified sets of data that could form the basis of individual agreements. The industry groups also sought to agree the format in which fields in such data sets were interchange so that a company only needed to develop one methodology for decoding information received without resource to human intervention. The XML/EDI specific components are built on top of existing standards for transmitting and processing XML-encoded data. These standards define shared features such as: the standard Internet file storage/naming and data transport mechanisms, file and message transfer formats, the syntax of data coded in XML, the way in which XML files can be validated by an XML parser or document object model generator, the way in which XSL presentation and data evaluation scripts can be associated with parsed objects, the use of rules and data management robots to manage application and repository interfaces.