Expert View - Antonella De Robbio
In Digital Libraries (M.I.T. Press, January 2000 – rev.ed June 2005), William Arms defines Interoperability (IOP) as “the task of building coherent services for users when the individual components are technically different and managed by different organizations“.
In other words, Arms sees the problems of getting a wide variety of computing systems to work together as a fundamental challenge to all the aspects of digital libraries. In its complete form, interoperability would be synonymous with the seamless integration of disparate collections held by different organizations. I believe that this outlines very well organizational interoperability.
Christine Borgman (From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000) identifies three main aspects, relevant for digital libraries, relating to interoperability:
- Getting systems to work with one another in real time
- Enabling software to work on different systems (portability)
- Enabling data to be exchanged among different systems
In his article, ‘Interoperability: What is it and Why should I want it?‘ (Ariadne, Issue 24, 2000*), Paul Miller, goes beyond these technical aspects in the belief that interoperability is also related to the ways in which organisations work, particularly attitudes to information. He subdivided the interoperability concept in six aspects:
- Technical (communication, transport, storage, representation standards, common user interfaces…).
- Semantic (naming of things, authors, creators, means…).
- Human/political (decision to make resource less or wide available:ownership is stated here as access control, user profile..).
- Inter-community (between disciplines or institutions).
- Legal (access requirement, privacy control… between different legislation by different countries).
- International (problem of languages, difference in technical approach or working practices.
I see in these six aspects of interoperability the three levels identified by the DL.org Policy Working Group because on the technical level we have all issues concerning software, systems, data. On the semantic level we have issues concerning content, with also syntactic interoperability (concerning data) and on the organisational level we could aggregate political/human issues, inter-communities aspects, legal matters, and international scale of differences.
Open systems facilitate standardisation, which is closely interrelated with interoperability. The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) differentiates the three layers of technical, semantic and organisational IOP. The draft of the second version adds the layers of legal IOP and the political context (European Communities 2008). Definition of organisational IOP in different framework concepts [European Journal of ePractice N' 6 - January 2009 - ISSN: 1988-625X www.epracticejournal.eu]:
“Organisational interoperability concerns a broad set of elements of interaction, including business processes, business interfaces such as email, web portals, etc., business events within and between administrations, and “life” events, involving the external parties: businesses and citizens. This aspect of interoperability is concerned with how different organisations such as different Member State Administrations collaborate to achieve their mutually beneficial, mutually agreed eGovernment service-related goals. The partners need to reach detailed agreements on how their processes will interact (synchronize and cooperate) in order to deliver “public services where needed”. [...] “Organisational Interoperability aims at addressing the requirements of the user community by making services available, easily identifiable, accessible and user-oriented. Organisational interoperability occurs when actors agree on the why and the when of exchanging information, on common rules to ensure it occurs safely, with minimal overhead, on an ongoing basis, and then draw up plans to do all these things, and carry them out.”
‘Three dimensions of organizational interoperability‘, European Journal of ePractice, N’ 6 – January 2009 – ISSN: 1988-625X
Antonella De Robbio, University Centre for Libraries of the Library System, University of Padua, Italy
* cited for research purposes with the aim of drawing attention to documents deemed to provide key background information for the investigations of DL.org Working Group investigations
RFC Version of the DL.org Cookbook released
Thursday, October 14th, 2010DL.org Cookbook - Request for Comment
The demand for powerful and rich Digital Libraries capable of supporting a broad variety of interdisciplinary activities and the pressing need to address the data deluge are intimately bound up with the increasing need for “building by re-use” and “sharing”. Interoperability plays a crucial role in responding to these needs. Despite efforts to address interoperability, current solutions are still limited. The lack of a systematic approach on the one hand and scarce knowledge of current solutions adopted on the other are among the main impediments to interoperability. What’s more, solutions are all too often confined to the systems they have been designed for.
Chartered with addressing interoperability challenges, the DL.org project and its contributing experts have produced a Request for Comment version of the Technology and Methodology Digital Library Cookbook. The Cookbook is aimed at collecting and describing a portfolio of best practices and pattern solutions to common challenges face when it comes to developing large-scale interoperable Digital Library systems.
This first Request for Comment (RFC) version of the Cookbook, which should not be considered neither authoritative nor final but rather as a “work in progress” with the aim of enhancing it through external feedback.
Contributing to the Cookbook
Requests for Comments regard both the Cookbook as a whole, as well as on any of its components by leveraging expertise outside the DL.org project. The Cookbook main components are:
Feedback on the Cookbook is requested until the end of November 2010 and should be sent to cookbook@dlorg.eu. To provide feedback in the form of a blog posting, please contact info@dlorg.eu. Before sending feedback, we strongly advise you to read the terms and conditions.
Tags: interoperability, interoperability scenarios, organisational interoperability, request for comment, semantic interoperability, technical interoperability, Technology & Methodology Cookbook
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