This document addresses the fundamental requirements of the commercial and legal frameworks and their environments on business transactions. It also integrates the requirements of the information technology and telecommunications environments.

In addition to the existing strategic directions of "portability" and "interoperability", the added strategic direction of ISO/IEC JTC 1 of "cultural adaptability" is supported in this document. It also supports requirements arising from the public policy/consumer environment, cross-sectoral requirements and the need to address horizontal issues. It integrates these different sets of requirements. (See Figure 3)

This document allows constraints which include legal requirements, commercial and/or international trade and contract terms, public policy (e.g. privacy/data protection, product or service labelling, consumer protection), laws and regulations to be defined and clearly integrated into Open-edi through the BOV. This means that terms and definitions in this document serve as a common bridge between these different sets of business operational requirements, allowing the integration of code sets and rules defining these requirements to be integrated into businessprocesses electronically.

This document contains a methodology and tool for specifying common business practices as part of common business transactions in the form of scenarios, scenario attributes, roles, Information Bundles and Semantic Components. It achieves this by: 1) developing standard computer processable specifications of common business rules and practices as scenarios and scenario components; and thus, 2) maximizing the re-use of these components in business transactions.