The Open-edi Reference Model (ISO/IEC 14662:2010, Clause 4) states:

"The intention is that the sending, by an Open-edi Party, of information from a scenario, conforming to Open-edi standards, shall allow the acceptance and processing of that information in the context of that scenario by one or more Open-edi Parties by reference to the scenario and without the need for agreement. However, the legal requirements and/or liabilities resulting from the engagement of an organization in any Open-edi transaction may be conditioned by the competent legal environment(s) or the formation of a legal interchange agreement between the participating organizations. Open-edi Parties need to observe rule-based behaviour and possess the ability to make commitments in Open-edi (e.g., business, operational, technical, legal, and/or audit perspectives)."

ISO/IEC 15944-1:2011 addresses the fundamental requirements of the commercial and legal frameworks and their environments on business transactions, and 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 ISO/IEC 15944-1:2011. It also supports requirements arising from the public policy/consumer environment, cross-sectorial requirements and the need to address horizontal issues. It integrates these different sets of requirements.

ISO/IEC 15944-1:2011 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 ISO/IEC 15944-1:2011 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 business processes electronically.

ISO/IEC 15944-1:2011 contains a methodology and tool for specifying common business practices as parts 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.