1. An article of manufacture comprising: a data storage component; a processor connected to access data stored by the data storage component; and stored by the data storage component: one or more segment group data structures, each including information about one or more types of transaction segment data items; and one or more attribute data items that indicate attributes of types of transactions; the segment group data structures and the attribute data items including standard-based abstraction artifacts resulting from a standard-based abstraction operation that uses a starting transaction segment data item in a standard-based format to obtain a respective resulting data item; the starting transaction segment data item including one or more element fields, each element field having a respective element value that is one of a set of possible element values of a respective transaction-related attribute; the standard-based abstraction artifacts including a replacement artifact indicating that, in each of a first subset of one or more of the element fields, the respective element values in the starting transaction segment data item were replaced in the resulting data item by a universal element value that represents any type of element value; the standard-based abstraction further including added information indicating one or both of: a usage attribute that could not be obtained by inspection of the starting transaction segment data items individually, the usage attribute indicating one or more of: whether a field is always, sometimes, or never used in data items of the same type; whether a field always has the same value in data items of the same type; transaction scope; trading partner scope; whether a field or element is hard coded; whether a field or element is empty; and a complete list of all values found for a field or element; and a type attribute indicating at least one of a type of transaction, a segment name, a trading partner, a type of loop, a position, sender, receiver, standards version, document type, document number, document date, control numbers, and control counts.