Surely someone in the EDI world was doing something close enough to this patent in order for it to be prior art. I'm not a lawyer, but EDI is old and exchanging documents with predefined data structures goes way back... Every EDI partner agrees on a standard and a document type before exchanging information. This is the defined structure of the data, stored in a separate document (UCS 5010, etc.) Someone should go down this path and see if it is prior art.