Social and Solidarity Economy Web Information Systems: State of the Art and an Interoperability Framework

Introduction

The Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) can be broadly defined as a type of economy in which the goals are different either from the ones of the market economy or from the state's (Lechat, 2007). Allegedly, these goals are neither centered in profit nor in individualistic needs. It is an economy that presents itself as a material and human alternative to capitalist economy (Cattani, Laville, Gaiger, & Hespanha, 2009).

Social and solidarity economy organisations are composed of self-organized communities (e.g. geographical or sectorial). These organisations have machine-to-machine communication needs that are internal or external to them, for example to other kind of organisations like governmental organisations. In order to support these machine-to-machine communication needs, there is the need to provide interoperable solutions among the software platforms that support their activities. As we are talking about exchange of information between machines (software), full compliance with international standards is essential. The search on bibliographic databases revealed no initiatives of interoperability between SSE Web Based Information Systems (WIS), so it was necessary to replace the literature review with two other sources of information: 1) Preliminary analysis of the WIS that support SSE activities; and 2) Interviews with the representatives of some of the world's most important SSE organisations. They showed that, in fact, the WIS are still not interoperable, but that there are efforts in this direction promoted by these organisations.

The objective of this article is to draw the state of the art on interoperability developments for the SSE world community, to present a framework of interoperability for the SSE and the developments made in the last 3 years in a research-in-progress PhD which aims to contribute to achieve this framework.

This document proceeds as follows. Section 2 shows presents the context in which the concepts of SSE, semantic Web and semantic interoperability are explained in more detail. Section 3 presents the methodology used for each of the tasks carried out in defining the state-of-the-art on interoperability developments for the SSE. Section 4 presents the state-of-the-art mentioned above and the developments in the framework of SSE interoperability. Closing conclusions and future work are drawn in the final section.