SUO: Semantic interoperability
At 13:37 2001-12-05 -0500, John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> On the NCITS L8 mailing list, there was some discussion of how
> the term "semantic interoperability" might be defined. Someone
> suggested a defintion taken from a standards document, which I
> criticized as a big fuzzy cloud of words. I'm sending a copy
> of that note to the SUO list because such a definition is also
> necessary for defining conformance for any system that uses
> an ontology.
Here was my note on the NCITS/L8 in response to Joe Christensen. In the usage below (which, I believe, serves Joe's purposes), agreement on "meaning" is not necessarily dependent upon a machine representation of meaning.
-FF
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Joe-
The ISO/IEC 2382 Information Technology Vocabulary (ITV) might be able to help you. The definition of "interoperability" is:
01.01.47 interoperability: The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units.
In short, "interoperability" means communication/ execution/ data transfer without knowing the nature of the implementations (e.g., the endpoints of communication, the execution environment, data repositories, etc.).
I got the following definition from "dictionary.com":
se·man·tic (s-mntk) also se·man·ti·cal (-t-kl) adj.
1. Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language.
2. Of, relating to, or according to the science of semantics.
I believe the construction "semantic" [dictionary.com] + "interoperability" [ISO/IEC 2382] would work well:
semantic + interoperability: In the conext of or relating to *meaning*, the capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units.
or shortened a bit:
semantic interoperability: The capability to preserve meaning in communications, program execution, and data transfer among various functional units.
In other words, the above definition should be compatibly with "interoperability" when used in standards wording.
[FYI, I saw Leo Obrst's E-mail and his comments parallel mine in the "flow" diagram I've presented several times to SC32/WG2: Requirements -> Functionality -> Conceptual Model -> Semantics -> Bindings -> Encodings. I'll send you a copy of the slide if you don't have it already. Let me know.]
-FF
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Frank Farance, Farance Inc. T: +1 212 486 4700 F: +1 212 759 1605
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