Pragmatic Interoperability - Consistent Usage in Metadata Standards

The term interoperability was first applied to the parts needed to maintain military equipment during WWII. The same axles, for instance, could be used in jeeps, personnel trucks, etc. For IT systems, the term addresses the ability to use a resource without outside help. This applies to systems, structures, representations, and meanings. Combinations of these imply data can be interoperable.

With the adoption and use of metadata standards such as those in the DDI family, another form of interoperability is needed. Many of the DDI specs are complex, and it turns out the same descriptive problem can be handled in several ways in some situations using these standards. A second problem is the multiplicity of uses of some aspects of the standards. For humans reading the content in an application, these differences are surmountable even though they are annoying. Machines don't have that flexibility. And with the current emphasis on machine actionable metadata, the issue needs to be thoroughly understood.

If we think of the specification, the individual elements, and their content as the constituents of declarative sentences, what is being said by this combination is different in each case. This can be characterized as pragmatics, thus we are interested pragmatic interoperability. When the same content is managed through different parts of a specification, different sentences result.

In this talk, we define what is meant by pragmatic interoperability, provide examples of it, and propose guidelines for how to avoid the problem.