A Pragmatic Approach to Sustainable Interoperability for the Web 2.0 World

Abstract:

In the geosciences, interoperability is a fundamental requirement. Members of various standards organizations such as the OGC and ISO-TC 211 have done yeomen services to promote a standards-centric approach to manage the interoperability challenges that organizations face today. The specific challenges that organizations face when adopting interoperability patterns are very many. One approach, that of mandating the use of specific standards has been reasonably successful. But scientific communities, as with all others, ultimately want their solutions to be widely accepted and used. And to this end there is a crying need to explore all possible interoperability patterns without restricting the choices to mandated standards. Standards are created by a slow and deliberative process that sometimes takes a long time to come to fruition and therefore sometime feel to fall short of user expectations. It seems therefore that organizations are left with a series of perceived orthogonal requirements when they want to pursue interoperability. They want a robust but agile solution, a mature approach that also needs to satisfy latest technology trends and so on.

Sustainable interoperability patterns need to be forward looking and should choose the patterns and paradigms of the Web 2.0 generation. To this end, the key is to choose platform technologies that embrace multiple interoperability mechanisms that are built on fundamental "open" principles and which align with popular mainstream patterns.

We seek to explore data-, metadata- and web service-related interoperability patterns through the prism of building solutions that encourage strong implementer and end-user engagement, improved usability and scalability considerations, and appealing developer frameworks that can grow the audience. The path to tread is not new, and the geocommunity only needs to observe and align its end goals with current Web 2.0 patterns to realize all the benefits that today we all take for granted as part of our everyday use of technology.