Interoperability: what's in a name?

re: Interoperability: what's in a name?

Dennis E. Hamilton — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:14:34 GMT

Nice one.

I tend to identify some activities as diagonal, rather than vertical or horizontal. This happens with facilities that might be viewed as infrastructural, and might even be out-sourced or facility-managed. IT itself has this quality, although the example I'm most comfortable with is production printing systems. The Exchange/Sharepoint stack, with its prospects for customization has a certain diagonal quality in my view.

I suppose we might say that an Office Open XML document with custom content has been diagonalized. The use of templates and profiles (for constraining what gets used in the context of a particular application) seems to fit as well.

Thanks. Lots to think about.

re: Interoperability: what's in a name?

dmahugh — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:20:23 GMT

Good point, shapes other than vertical/horizontal lines make sense. As the saying goes, there are two types of people, those who divide everything into two categories and those who don't. :-)

I mainly wanted to point out that agreement on things like text-formatting concepts, however important that may be for other reasons, doesn't have any relevance to semantics-based interoperability between different types of systems.

re: Interoperability: what's in a name?

Dennis E. Hamilton — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 05:59:27 GMT

"I mainly wanted to point out that agreement on things like text-formatting concepts, however important that may be for other reasons, doesn't have any relevance to semantics-based interoperability between different types of systems."

Except when it does, of course.

I thought you made a good point there.

And there is an amusing problem when people think <em> is somehow more semantic than <i> but they still show a button with an italic "i" to introduce it. Heh.

re: Interoperability: what's in a name?

W^L+ — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:26:25 GMT

Interesting argument. I do disagree with the idea that companies are only concerned with the vertical. Companies frequently exchange data (often in the form of files) with other companies. So there is also a need for the horizontal interop there. Sometimes an externally-created document must be utilized in a company's automated processes, with or without locally-added modifications.

re: Interoperability: what's in a name?

Sam Hiser — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 06:05:27 GMT

"The ODF translator project further extends horizontal interoperability by providing a bridge between the worlds of Open XML and ODF documents."

There is no "bridge"; the translator doesn't work.

re: Interoperability: what's in a name?

Dennis E. Hamilton — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:36:48 GMT

I just ran across an use of "diagonal functionality" in a great slide deck by Brent Williams. It is on slide 41 of 48. Williams also mentioned "Project Green" (Microsoft Dynamics) as an example. The slides were put up by Stephen Walli on his blog: http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/03/the_best_presen.html

I recommend this for anyone in the software business, especially at Microsoft. Matusow should love the part of the pitch on Eclipse at the end.

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