Damascus hosts EU -Arab workshop on electronic commerce

The European Commission and Syria organized a workshop in Damascus on electronic commerce. The workshop is about promoting EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) applications in Syria and other Arab states.

EDI concerns the use of an open electronic commercial language that enables enterprises in the commercial and industrial sectors to carry out their business more effectively and more profitably in the global market. The Damascus workshop will present EDI technology especially in the textile and tourism sectors in Syria, looking at issues such as including Arab characters in EDI messages, which, unlike fax or telex messages, can be processed by computer systems.

The seminar addresses businessmen and engineers willing to take part in the introduction of electronic commerce technology. During this session, the invited lecturers will cover the following topics: the state of the art of EDI in Europe and the world, the state of the art of EDI technology in the Arab states, EDI tools, infrastructure of EDI messaging, case studies, combination between technologies (EDI, Internet,etc.).

This session is one of the workshops of the MEDEDI (Mediterranean Electronic Data Interchange ) project sponsored by the European Union. The Damascus workshop is sponsored by HIAST ( Higher Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology), ( Syria), the Atomic Energy Commission (Syria), and the Kuwaiti Institute for Scientific Research. The workshop is held in the framework of the Arab school of science and technology (ASST, at HIAST (Damascus, on 25-27, January 1999.