The Higher Education sector has invested a lot of time and effort into the development and adoption of open standards. Interoperability has, for some time, been one of the key design-principles in the development of new software and services. Developers working in projects funded by JISC for example are, necessarily, at pains to demonstrate that their solution uses open standards where possible in order to ensure interoperability. Would I be amiss if I suggested that there are some who have been satisfied to leave it there?
Interoperability is a capability, no more. We assert that our software can interoperate, with other software which has adopted that same open standards. This is important, but it is not enough. The final proof, that the approach of ensuring interoperability through open standards has been worth the candle, is when systems actually interoperate to some useful purpose.
I propose that we have enough interoperability to be getting on with. What we need now, is interoperation!
Technorati Tags: higher education, interoperability, interoperation, JISC
I agree with you – in the JISC context I think that there is a lot of awareness of the importance of interoperability and people are building the capability and then expecting others to do something with it. Sometimes that next step happens (there seems to be a fair amount of OAI-PMH harvesting going on, for example), but not always. Part of the problem is the issue of trusting another organisation to continue to provide a service – the risk-free approach is to keep everything in-house, and many organisations are quite risk-averse.
People don’t seem particularly keen to share information about their interoperability capability either – it can be quite hard to find out what is available (and of course we’d love to have more people describing these kinds of resources in IESR!).
I’d have to say though, that beyond the realms of JISC (I’m thinking of local authorities in particular) the awareness of interoperability is much lower. I spend a lot of time talking to information professionals who are wholly focused on what they can do within the walls of their institution, for their own institution’s users, without thinking about how their resources might be made available beyond their own web interfaces.
A lot of this seems to be down to the attitudes and offerings of the software vendors in the library and information world. Until the information professionals recognise the importance of these open standards and start insisting that the software solutions support them, these resources will continue to exist in closed systems, shut off from the wider information environment.
I’m sure you’re right. When you live & breath interoperability for long enough it’s easy to forget that not everyone has the same perspective. Interoperability is still important.
But I’m starting to wonder what it really amounts to without evidence of established interoperation realising the capabilities implied in interoperability.
during the first 5 years of EDINA’s operation, we used to stress the importance of four keywords: outreach (getting out there, both to get our message across but also to listen); accessibility (before the word was hi-jacked we also meant ‘access’ and ‘reliability’); inter-working (which put the focus on the business of working together, whether in project, service or b2b); inter-operability.
Its that combination of the last two that I think you are calling interoperation. In practise the standards give us a basis for interoperability but unless there is focus on teh business needs to inter-work the effort required to set up protocols and also publish the means to interoperate, there is often limited interoperation.