Interoperability - Software

Software

With respect to software, the term interoperability is used to describe the capability of different programs to exchange data via a common set of exchange formats, to read and write the same file formats, and to use the same protocols. (The ability to execute the same binary code on different processor platforms is 'not' contemplated by the definition of interoperability.) The lack of interoperability can be a consequence of a lack of attention to standardization during the design of a program. Indeed, interoperability is not taken for granted in the non-standards-based portion of the computing world.

According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, Information Technology Vocabulary, Fundamental Terms, interoperability is defined as follows: "The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units".

Note that the definition is somewhat ambiguous because the user of a program can be another program and, if the latter is a portion of the set of program that is required to be interoperable, it might well be that it does need to have knowledge of the characteristics of other units.

This definition focuses on the technical side of interoperability, while it has also been pointed out that interoperability is often more of an organizational issue: often interoperability has a significant impact on the organizations concerned, raising issues of ownership (do people want to share their data?), labor relations (are people prepared to undergo training?) and usability. In this context, a more apt definition is captured in the term "business process interoperability".

Interoperability can have important economic consequences; for example, research has estimated the cost of inadequate interoperability in the U.S. capital facilities industry to be $15.8 billion a year. If competitors' products are not interoperable (due to causes such as patents, trade secrets or coordination failures), the result may well be monopoly or market failure. For this reason, it may be prudent for user communities or governments to take steps to encourage interoperability in various situations. In the United Kingdom, for example, there is an eGovernment-based interoperability initiative called e-GIF while in the United States there is the NIEM initiative. Standards Defining Organizations (SDOs) provide open public software specifications to facilitate interoperability; examples include the Oasis-Open organization and buildingSMART (formerly the International Alliance for Interoperability). As far as user communities, Neutral Third Party is creating standards for business process interoperability. Another example of a neutral party is the RFC documents from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The OSLC (Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration) Community is working on finding a common standard in order that software tools can share and exchange data e.g. bugs, tasks, requirements etc. The final goal is to agree on an open standard for interoperability of open source tools.