Identification of Different Types of Standards for Domain-Specific Interoperability

Robert Stegwee, Professor in Design and Implementation of Business Information Systems at the School of Business, Public Administration and Technology of the University of Twente., and Boriana Rukanova, PhD candidate on Distributed Business Transaction Standards at the Department of Business Information Systems.

3/13/2008
(Original Publish Date: 8/1/2003)

Communication is at the core of society, and a networked society needs to adopt standards to achieve effective communication. However, from a practical point of view, it is often hard to find out what a particular standard actually has to offer. This problem becomes even more serious when it comes to domain specific standards. To what extent different domain specific standards cover the same ground and lead to the same results is often not easy to find out. This paper explores the nature of available standards with respect to the contribution they make toward standardizing the communication within a specific domain. To achieve this, the notion of interoperability is expanded beyond the computer science definition towards an organizational context, in which the interoperability has to demonstrate itself. In addition, different kinds of communication between organizational systems and different levels of interoperability are defined. To this end the paper addresses the different kinds of issues that need to be tackled and illustrates to what extent different standards can actually fulfill these needs. The ultimate aim is to focus the attention of standards development organizations on the type of standard they want to produce and also to provide for a more clear understanding of the possibilities to attain true interoperability given the (set of) standards that are available for a particular domain.