Interoperability

Hello, and welcome to this short talk about Interoperability. In this session, we will talk about what interoperability is, and how giving it attention can support effective collaboration and re-use. We touch on several points to consider when choosing and or designing research tools, and give examples of the way interoperability has been considered in two academic fields — with some implications that can be useful in any field.

What is interoperability?

“Interoperability” is a characteristic of a system that means it can work with other systems. Many organisations are independent in their day-to-day operations, but also able to share information when needed. For example, a hospital and a clinic in different health authorities have protocols they need to follow when they work together to treat a patient. Another example is Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia works well partly because there are multiple Wikipedias: one for each major language. This way, the sites can share a core technical infrastructure, without becoming a Tower of Babel — or requiring everyone to learn English. The workflows interoperate smoothly.

How does interoperability relate to open research?

In an open research context, “interoperability” means that the way things work in one research project can be taken up in another context without too much friction. As such, the concept of interoperability encompasses both “how you can build on pre-existing work”, and “how others can build on yours.” For these things to be possible, one set of data and methods needs to be able to interoperate with another. Often, this happens without direct interaction between the two different research teams. While there may be a technical dimension to this (for example, related to sharing or exchanging data in suitable formats), even more fundamentally ‘interoperability’ is related to what Baroness Onora O’Neill has referred to as intelligent openness: “ensur[ing] that others can not only locate but also understand and assess material.”

When is attention to interoperation needed in open research?

You will be able to develop the necessary dimensions of ‘interoperability’ between your work and others’ in dialogue, by asking them what they need you to do for you to be able to work together compatibly. In this way, people who use your research effectively become “collaborators”. However, open research can also involve setting things up so that people who you never interact with directly are able to easily re-use your research. This means anticipating interoperability requirements in advance, while being open-minded to the possibility of interactions that you can’t anticipate. This has the practical implication that you may want to check back from time to time using tools like Google Scholar, or with more hands-on follow-up studies, to see how people are (in fact) making use of your research.

Interoperation makes cross-setting co-working possible

Interoperation can apply at the level of tools and data, or the interpersonal level (or both). Open source software includes aspects of both. For example, a relevant design principle taken over from the UNIX operating system is for individual open source software packages to “do one thing well”, and to work as an interoperable part of a software tool chain. To achieve this, the individual projects need to involve a sufficiently large and diverse team. Another adage from the open source world is that “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.” The main take-away here is that to build vibrant projects, you need to give attention to creating a healthy collaboration culture that is suitable to participants’ ways of working.

Choosing and designing suitable tools

For simple data-focused workflows, a baseline consideration might be ‘how easy it is to get your data in and out of the system?’. For more complicated workflows which involve building entirely new systems, research might be needed to look at the design considerations that allow others to use the system for their own purposes. Let’s have a look at a couple of dimensions of interoperability, through the lens of different academic disciplines.

Interoperability can be useful even when it’s not universal

Building information modelling (BIM) involves “the generation and management of digital representations of the physical and functional characteristics of buildings and other physical assets.” More succinctly, BIM is about building “a shared digital representation founded on open standards for interoperability”. BIM allows teams to collaborate and coordinate work, and reduce conflicts and errors. That being said, the standards that apply to European buildings don’t necessarily apply in the developing world. The fact that it doesn’t work equally in all contexts doesn’t take away from the value of BIM in the contexts where it does work.

Creating interoperability also doesn’t mean removing all friction

You might convene a workshop that brings some of the people who use your research together, and that creates opportunities for them to interact with each other. This might, for example, lead to some interesting debates. In general, if you’re able to work with people who think about things in different ways, this can help you make unexpected discoveries (we will discuss the related topic of research diversity in another video)

Whether you are working across geographical and economic regions or across neighbourhoods, interoperability can get complex. Grappling with this complexity may require working across disciplinary boundaries as well.

Link

• https://www.brookes.ac.uk/research/networks

References

Sennett, R., & Sendra, P. (2020). Designing disorder: Experiments and disruptions in the city. Verso Books.

Merton, R. (1936). The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action, 1AM. SOC. REV, 894, 903-04. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2084615

Abigail Emery, Dr Laura de Molière, Dr Paulina Lang, Dr Moira Nicolson, and Eleanor Prince. (2021) IN CASE: A behavioural approach to anticipating unintended consequences. Government Communication Service. https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/in-case-a-behavioural-approach-to-anticipating-unintended-consequences/