Interoperate

Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood, to work with other products or systems, at present or future, in either implementation or access, without any restrictions.

While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader definition takes into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to system performance. Task of building coherent services for users when the individual components are technically different and managed by different organizations

If two or more systems are capable of communicating with each other, they exhibit syntactic interoperability when using specified data formats and . XML or SQL standards are among the tools of syntactic interoperability. This is also true for lower-level data formats, such as ensuring alphabetical characters are stored in a same variation of ASCII or a Unicode format (for English or international text) in all the communicating systems.

Beyond the ability of two or more computer systems to exchange information, semantic interoperability is the ability to automatically interpret the information exchanged meaningfully and accurately in order to produce useful results as defined by the end users of both systems. To achieve semantic interoperability, both sides must refer to a common information exchange reference model. The content of the information exchange requests are unambiguously defined: what is sent is the same as what is understood. The possibility of promoting this result by user-driven convergence of disparate interpretations of the same information has been object of study by research prototypes such as S3DB.

Multiple social, organizational, political, legal entities working together for a common interest and/or information exchange.

Interoperability imply Open standards ab-initio, i.e. by definition. Interoperability imply exchanges between a range of products, or similar products from several different vendors, or even between past and future revisions of the same product. Interoperability may be developed , as a special measure between two products, while excluding the rest, by using Open standards. When a vendor is forced to adapt its system to a dominant system that is not based on Open standards, it is not interoperability but only compatibility.

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