Business Messaging Standards

Business messaging standards ensure effective collaborative commerce practices among trading partners. The business messaging standards supported by GS1 Canada include:

• Global Location Number (GLN) — A unique identification number for your company that can be used to define legal entities, functional entities or physical entities. The GLN is the new industry standard for company and location information. Review GLN Allocation Rules.

• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) — A standard format for computer-to-computer transmission of business information and transactions between trading partners, such as invoices and purchase orders.

• EDI over the Internet (EDI INT) — EDI INT can help your business increase data accuracy, reduce order cycle time, and increase sales.

• Extensible Markup Language (XML) — XML is designed to improve the functionality of the Web by providing more flexible and adaptable information exchange over the Internet. XML allows individuals to customize markup languages for limitless different types of documents.

  • GS1 has developed a suite of GS1 XML viewing and navigation tools to help users gain a better understanding of the structure of different XML schemas and the relationship between them. Click here to access the viewing and navigation tools for the GS1 XML standards.