# Interoperability

In this learning tasks we consider interoperabilty in the context of facilitation of collaborative work and with respect to the sustainable development goals. We start with a definition of Interoperability as a characteristic of a network of individuals or connected components. In general it is a system, that can be decomposed into parts and subparts, that interact with eachother. The collaboration or interaction of the individuals with other individuals and/or in the between components and players in the system happen as interfaces. These interface can be standardized more or less.
* Open extensible interfaces allows to exchange products and information that would violate a more strict standards of exchange,
* strict standards for interoperability do not allow to much freedom of submit data or products at the interface, but may increase the processing speed of the data or product at the interface, because actors at the interface do not need to handle to much complexity.
Interoperability in this context of collaboration for the learning resource will be defined by a Requirements and Constraints Analysis for the interfaces. Due to the fact that interoperability must serve the collaboration at present and for the future, the standards for the interface design may require an evolutionary adaptation in either implementation or access. This evolutionary principle in turn requires extensibility of standards at the collaborative interfaces, because older collaborative structure that provide a good collaborative service in a network should not fail all of a sudden due to changes in the interface standards.

## History

While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader definition takes into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to system performance. Hence interoperability involves the task of building coherent services for users when the individual components are technically different and managed by different organizations.

## Learning Tasks

* (Definitions) Analyze different definitions of "Interoperability" and identify the differences and common properties..
* (Intermodal Public Transport) Analyze Intermodal Public Transport and define requirements and constraints with the decomposition of passenger transport unit (transport container for cargo) from the propulsion unit. Explain, why this decomposition requires interoperability from the accommodation to work, for holidays or other social activities.
* (Non-digital - digital Interoperability) Compare interoperabiltiy in the digital world with interoperability in the non-digital world. What are similarities and differences?
* (Documents - Interoperability of Formats) The OpenSource software PanDoc by John MacFarlane read several input format (including MediaWiki syntax, Markdown, LaTeX, HTML, ...) and is able to convert the input formats different other output formats (including Office documents like LibreOffice Writer, ...). Explain the concept of interoperability of document used in Digital Learning Environments, so that learners/students use and edit documents in the IT-environment at schools, colleges and universities within the IT-infrastructure, that is available.
* (Quiz) Wikiversity has support for multiple choice self-assessment quizzes. Create a JSON file from which you can generate at least two output formats
** a Wikiversity quiz (Open Content),
** a questionnaire in OpenSource SurveryJS framework,
** a LaTeX output for an SDAPS questionnaire,
** HTML form for a submission URL of your choice, e.g. to Restful API or server backend in your educational organisation, school, college, university, ...
** as a questionnaire for Open Data Kit (ODK)
** as a questionnaire for LimeSurvey
    Describe the benefits of such an interoperable definition of questionnaires for different self-assessment framework or server backends for doing a scientific survey or use the questionnaire in learning environments for Learner Analytics.