Interoperability, standards, and the geospatial industry
"Open System"
An "open system" is one with characteristics that comply with specified, publicly maintained, readily available standards. Those systems can therefore be connected to other systems that comply with these same standards. Within OGC, many of the terms and concepts related to open systems and interoperability can be traced to the Open Systems Interconnection-Reference Model (OSI-RM).
"Interoperability"
"Interoperability" is another term that is overused, and hence perhaps not clearly understood in the ICT world. What does OGC mean by interoperability?
The OGC staff and members are committed to the concept of geospatial data, services, and application interoperability. Together with terms like "metadata" and "joined-up thinking", "interoperability" is increasingly being used in information management discourse across all of our information gathering institutions. From the OGC technology perspective, as documented in the OGC Abstract Specification (derived from ISO 2382-1 and 19119), interoperability is 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."