Interoperability Approaches for Enterprises and Administrations Worldwide

Y. Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens, H. Panetto, Research Centre for Automatic Control (CRAN), Nancy-University, CNRS, E. Loukis, Aegean University, and K. Mertins, Fraunhofer IPK, Pascalstr. 8-9, 10587 Berlin, Germany

7/18/2008
(Original Publish Date: 3/1/2008)

During the last few years, research and practice worldwide have shown that enhancing interoperability among organizations, systems or software applications is a multi-disciplinary issue of critical importance, touching upon processes, data and technical standardization. Fortunately, researchers and practitioners have started to realize the impact of interoperability in achieving true one-stop service provision for citizens and businesses, in fostering collaboration between enterprises or in minimizing the needed investment for maintaining complex systems. Current research results show that there exist common practices to be shared among public sector organisations and private sector enterprises, in attempts related with aligning organisation and processes, tackling semantic and technical shortcomings, building relevant architectures and finally achieving the legal interconnection and co-operation of systems. The identification of such common areas between eBusiness and eGovernment can then lead to a joint exploration, enhance reuse of the real paradigms and real exploitation of results by enterprises and administrations. Also future interoperability research directions, as emerging from relevant strategies and research roadmaps of important stakeholders, and also from relevant research workshops, are outlined. Furthermore, it is argued that interoperability research should be extended towards ‘knowledge interoperability’ as well, and deal with the development of methods and architectures enabling the exchange of knowledge among co-operating organizations.