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The ability of organizations to interact towards mutually beneficial goals, and involves the sharing of information and knowledge between these organizations, through the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their ICT systems. It's a characteristic of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood, to work with other products or systems, present or future, in either implementation or access, without any restrictions.
This definition is also a reminder of the vital link between interoperability and open standards. The specified interfaces undergo standardization processes to ensure the emergence and maintenance of common, documented references.
The crux of the matter is not only technical, but also based on a set of concerns at various levels. The EFI defines these as:
- Interoperability governance refers to decisions on interoperability frameworks, institutional arrangements, organizational structures, roles and responsibilities, policies, agreements and other aspects of ensuring and monitoring interoperability at national and EU levels.
- Legal interoperability is about ensuring that organizations operating under different legal frameworks, policies and strategies are able to work together;
- Organisational interoperability refers to the way in which public administrations align their business processes, responsibilities and expectations to achieve commonly agreed and mutually beneficial goals;
- Semantic interoperability ensures that the precise format and meaning of exchanged data and information is preserved and understood throughout exchanges between parties, in other words ‘what is sent is what is understood’. In the EFI, semantic interoperability covers both semantic and syntactic aspects;
- Technical interoperability covers the applications and infrastructures linking systems and services. Aspects of technical interoperability include interface specifications, interconnection services, data integration services, data presentation and exchange, and secure communication protocols.
Internal interoperability is much more focused on the technical dimension. Particular attention should be paid to its definition, to ensure that it faithfully reflects expectations associated with the term, particularly in terms of independence - the term sovereignty is sometimes used - and neutrality.
A major obstacle to interoperability arises from legacy systems. Historically, applications and information systems in public administrations were developed in a bottom-up fashion, trying to solve domain-specific and local problems. This resulted in fragmented IM-IT which are difficult to interoperate. Due to the size of public administration and the fragmentation of IM-IT solutions, the plethora of legacy systems creates an additional interoperability barrier in the technical layer.
Technical interoperability should be ensured, whenever possible, via the use of open standards.
An interoperability framework is defined as a set of policies, guidelines, standards, rules and recommendations made by a network of actors with a view to achieving the highest level of interoperability possible. It also describes the operating rules that govern the analysis, selection, adoption and updating of each of these elements.
To ensure the deployment and longevity of interoperable systems, it is necessary to jointly select the standards to be adopted as well as the conditions for their implementation. This is why several European countries (including France and the UK) and Canadian provinces such as Quebec have chosen to establish interoperability frameworks. The results are compelling, as open standards are regularly and widely used, and always the first approach to be considered when new requirements emerge.
As mentioned in the various interoperability frameworks that have already been published, they are designed only to identify key standards and not to offer predefined, unique solutions (for example, in terms of which software to choose). The objective of an interoperability framework is, therefore, to facilitate and guide an organization's interoperability choices while also limiting the number of potential standards in order to guarantee maximum clarity.
Open standards refer to file formats, protocols and application interfaces that can be implemented by everyone (in open source and proprietary software alike) since the specifications are available at no cost, and since their development and standardization is open and transparent. This standardization work is done by specialized agencies that are usually either government agencies or organizations created by professionals from a given industry sector. Examples of such organizations include the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
The exact definition of open standards can vary by jurisdiction, but there is a high level of convergence in France's Référentiel Général d'Interopérabilité (RGI) or "General Guidelines for Interoperability", the Cadre Commun d'Interopérabilité du Gouvernement du Québec (CCIGQ) of the "Quebec government's common interoperability framework", the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the British Cabinet Office's Open Standards Principles.
Inspired by the four policy documents, the following criteria define open standards:
- process for the standard's development is open and transparent to all interested parties and cannot be controlled by any single person or entity with any vested interests;
- platform independent, vendor neutral and usable for multiple implementations;
- specifications and supporting material are freely available with limited restrictions;
- supported by the community and demonstrate independence or approved through due process by rough consensus among participants.
The human readable version of software. The code is written by developers and can be read and modified by others. The code can be compiled into an executable or binary, that is not readable.
Free software is software that respects users' freedom and community. The term “free” is more a matter of liberty than price, as it refers to the users’ freedom.
Free software is the original name put forward by Richard Stallman and defended by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Free software is defined by four essential freedoms. The freedom to run the program, study how it works, modify it and redistribute it. Access to the source code is a precondition for these freedoms and not the end goal itself.
Software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
The name used by the Open Source Initiative. Open source software is defined in the Open Source Definition by ten criteria.
Open source hardware products are tangible artifacts — machines, devices, or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things.
Intellectual property (or "IP") is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, and primarily encompasses copyrights, patents, and trademarks. It also includes other types of rights, such as trade secrets, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unfair competition.
A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. A typical software license grants the licensee, typically an end-user, permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise potentially constitute copyright infringement of the software owner's exclusive rights under copyright law. Two common categories for software under copyright law, are proprietary software and open source software.
Copyright is a form of intellectual property, applicable to certain forms of creative work. Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.
Copyleft is a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some, but not all, rights under copyright law. Copyleft allows an author to impose some restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would usually be reserved by the copyright holder. Under copyleft, derived works may be produced if they are released under the compatible copyleft scheme.
A software product or service that is designed to store and retrieve several versions of source code and related assets in a consistent way, and that can be centralized, decentralized or distributed.