Interoperability? Are Standards The Answer?Interoperability Meeting - 14-15 October 2004
Interoperability? Are Standards The Answer?Brian Kelly gave a 15-20 minute talk on Interoperability? Are Standards The Answer? which was followed by 30 minutes of discussion at a meeting on Migrating to open source: interoperability issues Workshop organised by OSS Watch. The meeting took place on 14-15th October 2004 at Rewley House, Department for Continuing Education, Oxford (building number 12 on the campus map.
The goal of this workshop is to investigate the interoperability issues surrounding migration to open source software within UK higher and further education. The workshop will result in two deliverables:
A list of participants is available.
The use of open standards are normally promoted as the solution to interoperability. Although a long-standing advocate of open standards, in this talk Brian Kelly will outline some of the limitations of open standards such as lessons from history; limitations of the standardisation processes; responses from the marketplace and the need to address user requirements. The talk illustrates these points using the example of Web standards.
Brian will argue that rather than mandating use of open standards there is a need to develop an open standards culture which is supportive of the advantages promised by open standards but is flexible enough to respond to broader issues.
