Information Interoperability

Arnon Rosenthal

Len Seligman

   e don't have to work too hard to convince people of the benefits of interoperability. Most of us have experienced the frustration of lack of interoperability—information can't be exchanged, connections can't be made, valuable time and opportunities are lost.

In the past, we had our hands full just coping with the "plumbing" aspects of interoperability—ensuring that the bits could reliably flow from source to destination. Now that connectivity to diverse sources has eased, the emphasis is shifting to information interoperability—i.e., the ability to meaningfully exchange information among separately developed systems, including the understanding of the information's format, meaning, and quality. Information interoperability continues to be a huge challenge for government and industry because of the need to share information across autonomous organizations and to cope with continuous change, mergers, splits, and 20 years of coexisting technology.

MITRE is involved in a wide range of interoperability activities, from creating new military systems that will work together, to emergency "patching" in the field, to far-reaching research on the Semantic Web. This issue of The Edge highlights a variety of ways to increase interoperability.

We begin by outlining a "framework" for interoperability and what you should know before your organization develops a strategy for improving interoperability. Next we talk about how the Department of Defense will meet the needs of the future in a fully connected world.

Then we have an article about how you can better analyze information from many sources by using network representations and repositories. The fourth article discusses increasing interoperability by mapping independently developed aviation information systems; specifically, MITRE is helping the Federal Aviation Administration and Eurocontrol map their separate aeronautical information systems.

Then we showcase two examples of using data warehouses to achieve interoperability. On page 16, we begin a story on how creating standards can be the key to sharing data across multiple systems, such as those of the intelligence agencies. And next is an article on using Extensible Markup Language (XML) to exchange military messages over different systems.

We also have an article on the Semantic Web, which will make information "machine understandable," and thus easier to exchange and search.

For more information, please contact guest editors Arnon Rosenthal or Len Seligman using the employee directory.

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