The Role of Standards for Interoperating Information Systems

Abstract

For integrating heterogeneous information systems, semantic interoperability is necessary to ensure that exchange of information makes sense — that the provider and requester of information have a common understanding of the ‘meaning’ of the requested services and data. Effective exchange of information between heterogeneous systems needs to be based on a common understanding of the transferred data. This chapter discusses the role of domain-specific standards for managing semantic heterogeneity among dissimilar information sources. The process of integrating such heterogeneous information systems is also discussed in this context, whereby standards play a central role for ‘initiating’ top-down processes by means of defining common data models for the involved information sources.