The consistent use of terminology and EHR systems is essential to achieve semantic interoperability and to enable the exploitation of clinical data. However, it is not realistic to expect that all healthcare systems will use the same EHR representation and terminology systems. Diverging, often proprietary models, terminologies and value sets will continue characterising the clinical information...

Apart from introducing various benefits, the emerging software component technology raises a serious problem: How can developers as well as users manage interoperability issues and versions of a huge amount of components developed worldwide by independent providers? The current general way to describe interoperability information is to provide the component’s interface definition and some addit...

Enterprise interoperability in distributed environments has been recently improved by adopting the emerging Web Service standards and technology, making an ever-growing number of services available on the web. One of the major problems in this framework is how to make effective and efficient the process of matching service descriptions in order to find suitable available services for a given se...

Semantic interoperability for geographic information and services has been a main research area within Geographic Information Science. Success in solving semantic interoperability problems has been limited though, because many efforts are based on so-called realist semantics approaches. Considering the fact that geographic information is eventually used by people, it is necessary to account for...

Distributed systems are becoming more complex in terms of both the level of heterogeneity encountered coupled with a high level of dynamism of such systems. Taken together, this makes it very difficult to achieve the crucial property of interoperability that is enabling two arbitrary systems to work together relying only on their declared service specification. This chapter examines this issue ...