Robert T. Crowley (born March 2, 1948) is a pioneer in the development and practice of
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), an early component of
electronic commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...
.
Crowley participated in the development of the early forms of EDI, working with
Edward A. Guilbert, the creator of the technology, from the 1977 onwards, and assisted in the development of
UN/EDIFACT
United Nations/Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (UN/EDIFACT) is an international standard for electronic data interchange (EDI) developed for the United Nations and approved and published by UNECE, the UN Econ ...
, the international EDI standard developed through the
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...
. Active in many EDI projects around the world, he served as Chair of
ANSI ASC X12
The Accredited Standards Committee X12 (also known as ASC X12) is a standards organization. Chartered by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1979, it develops and maintains the X12 Electronic data interchange (EDI) and Context In ...
, the US national standards body for EDI, from 1993 to 1995.
He is the founder of the EDI standards committee for the ocean transport industry (OCEAN), as well as the
US Customs Electronic Systems Advisory Committee (CESAC), advising the
US Customs Service
The United States Customs Service was the very first federal law enforcement agency of the U.S. federal government. Established on July 31, 1789, it collected import tariffs, performed other selected border security duties, as well as conducted ...
(USCS) on matters of electronic commerce. Robert was also a founding member of TOPAS (Terminal Operator and Port Authority Subcommittee) that initiated EDI use between ship lines and terminal operators/ports.
Robert also served as Chair of the
X12 Security Task Group for a number of years, and was one of the authors of the X12 technical report on the use of Extensible Markup Language
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
for conducting EDI. He is now vice chair of ISO Technical Committee 154 US Technical Advisory Group (ISO TC154 US TAG), and Editor of document ISO8601 ''Representation of Dates and Times''.
References
Robert T. Crowley; Senior Vice President, Research Triangle Commerce, Inc.at investing.businessweek.com
1948 births
Living people
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