Information Systems Interoperability The results of a research project on Information Systems Interoperability (ISI), undertaken within the framework of the EC-Australia Science and technology Cooperation Agreement have recently been published. The project was carried out by Australian and European researchers an... The results of a research project on Information Systems Interoperability (ISI), undertaken within the framework of the EC-Australia Science and technology Cooperation Agreement have recently been published. The project was carried out by Australian and European researchers and practitioners from different fields of expertise, including distributed systems, software engineering, information systems, and requirements engineering. The main goal of the project was the design and prototype of a distributed management environment that would support the optimized management of distributed applications in open distributed computing environments. The research carried out included the investigation of different methods for the periodical update and storage of management data, the design of a rule-based policy handling mechanism, the development of an adaptive resource management architecture and the design of enhanced interface definition language features. This publication provides an overview of the project, covering a variety of interoperability issues ranging from application to system interoperability. The first chapter summarizes the different facets of information systems interoperability, surveys the principal research problems in the design and application of interoperability solutions, and provides a classification of related research domains from which interoperability issues should be further investigated. The other chapters of the book are divided into three major areas which broadly reflect the special interests and experiences of the people involved in the project. The main subjects covered are as follows: - Object-based middleware techniques; . Distributed object platforms: the CORBA standard; . Distributed Components Object Model (DCOM); . Interoperability with CORBA - A case study; - Augmented platforms; . Synchronization constraints in object interfaces; . Compatibility of interoperable objects; . Composing distributed objects in CORBA; . Systems management; - Interoperation modelling; . Meta modelling: A formal basis for interoperability and adaptability; . Information brokering; . Interoperability: A system specification perspective.
