Interoperability Strategy: Concepts, Challenges and Recommendations

John Dodd, Bruce T. Peat, David R. Mayo, Eliot Christian, and David RR Webber

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 4/3/2003)

With over $50 billion in annual IT buying power, the US Federal Government has huge incentives to effectively integrate its new, and integrate its old, IT systems. The ways that it chooses to do so will also have an important impact on the IT world generally, as well as the evolution of standards. In this white paper, the authors explore ways that the government's historical systems and database silos can be made more interoperable and more capable of information sharing. The paper seeks to identify the principal challenges and potential approaches for dealing with those challenges, and ends by making some specific recommendations. The authors believe that the key to achieving these interoperability and sharing goals is the use not only of XML as a common standard syntax and TCP, but also what the authors call an infrastructure to support semantic alignment.