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OASIS Symposium: The Meaning of Interoperability

Interoperability is one of those multi-facet terms of which everyone has some understanding within his/her particular domain of experience or of expertise. Consequently these understandings may vary greatly, even when only considering e-Business or e-Government applications.

The facets of interoperability may also vary in importance depending on whether we look at it from the perspective of a business or government end-user, of a domain expert in a supply-chain, of an application developer, of a standard committee, or of a product manager. Yet, interoperability is an end-to-end value proposition: not addressing properly a single of these facets may invalidate or delay an entire deployment, sometimes casting an unfair discredit on other related efforts.

With a primary interest on e-Government and e-Business applications background, this Symposium will investigate the different facets of interoperability, their dependencies, the enabling technologies, standards and practices and opportunities for improvement. It aims at helping practitioners and designers of e-Business or e-Government systems to get a broader, more aligned understanding of interoperability issues and solutions.

OASIS invites proposals for presentations, panel sessions and tutorials on topics related to one or more aspects of interoperability, including but not limited to:

1. The standards perspective:
   
   
   • What characteristics of a standard help or hinder interoperability? How to handle optionality, lack of specificity, role of conformance clauses, test assertions, role of validation tools.
   • Foundations for interoperability: standards that can be combined - interdependency, layering, containment, bindings and interfaces.
   • The versioning nightmare: backward and upward compatibility of standards and systems. Easing the pain.
   • Current initiatives and practices in other organizations, such as standards profiling, etc.
   • Practical examples of where different standards produced by OASIS TCs need to (or can, or should) interoperate with other specifications (from OASIS or other organizations).
     
     
2. The business perspective:
   
   
   • The economics of interoperability: cost/benefit, risk, market drivers, the scoping of interoperable spaces.
   • Facing interoperability options: proprietary standards vs. open standards, decision criteria.
   • The logistics of interoperability: migration and transition, organizational and human impact.
   • Synthetic experience reports on interoperability (or lack of) with a comprehensive view, deployment hurdles and lessons learned.
     
     
3. The semantic perspective:
   
   
   • Speaking the same language: challenges and practices in aligning vocabularies and business notions.
   • The technology side: mapping, conversion, validation, transformation, equivalence.
   • Supporting internationalization.
     
     
4. The contractual perspective:
   
   
   • Agreeing on or advertising some mode of interoperability, capabilities, quality metrics and SLAs.
   • Defining interoperability rules, conditions and pre-requisites: policies.
   • Legal and enforcement aspects, monitoring, measures, auditing.
     
     
5. The infrastructure and product perspective:
   
   
   • Interoperable infrastructures, trade-offs between feature-richness and lowest common denominator, related aspects such as security, ownership, access.
   • Supporting interoperability requirements while still allowing product differentiation and competition.
   • Products and standards: strategy, evolution, compatibility.
   • Current assessment of interoperable infrastructures within and between large entities: governments, corporations, supply-chains.
     
     
6. The testing perspective:
   
   
   • Assessing and maintaining interoperability between systems and partners: logistics, cost, authorities.
   • Testing technologies and technology testing, practices and testbeds.
   • Agreeing on interoperability baseline among competing products: role of conformance, profiling.
   • Badging and certification.
     
     

OASIS also invites tutorials on topics not necessarily directly related to the Symposium theme.

The Program Committee encourages the following:

• Presentations that bind several of the above perspectives, highlighting their dependencies, complementarities or synergy.
  
  
• Presentations that focus on one of the above topics, insights on the state of the art, comparable practices and alternatives, and interoperability merits.
  
  
• Presentations that assess OASIS standards involved, if applicable, and provide suggestions on how OASIS can better support interoperability.
  
  
• Presentations that focus on how to improve interoperability.

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