3.3 Interoperability

Interoperability has become an issue in many areas of information technology in the last decade.  There is an increasing need to share various types of resources such as data and services, especially in the spatial information sector.  Spatial data has been collected, digitized, stored in various and differing repositories, as a result, the ability to integrate diverse information from different sources becomes difficult.  As such, problems of interoperability arise with incompatibilities in data format, software products, spatial conceptions, and data standards.  Non-interoperability severely limits the use of digital geographic information, and usually results in tedious data conversion processes being needed.  Therefore, solution to this problem is standardization.  If all providers comply with the same format of metadata, it would be much easier for the users to understand the data and put it to proper use.  Moreover, it is a solution to interoperability issues.  One of the focuses of our project is to attempt to minimize the gap of diverse datasets by setting standards in hopes of achieving interoperability between providers and user in the campus community.  This will allow users to use the diverse collection of data for research use without having to question if the datasets are compatible.

The gap of diverse datasets can be minimized using XML in hopes of achieving interoperability. “The World Wide Consortium envisions an application of XML where a single XML document may contain elements and attributes that are defined for and used by multiple software modules.” A single XML document, containing both FGDC and ISO metadata structures would indeed be useable by many software packages, if not, all that support XML-based metadata systems.  This is an excellent goal for the geo-spatial community to work towards, and ultimately could lead open participation in GIS reducing the interoperable problem.