Interoperability can be defined as the ability of two or more entities to communicate and cooperate despite differences in the implementation language, the execution environment or the model abstraction.
Syntactic interoperability is currently well defined and understood at the interface level.
The basic problem is that the study of interoperability at the other two levels currently presents serious challenges, from both the theoretical and practical points of view. This workshop focuses mainly on object interoperability at the protocol and semantic levels, in particular on the issues stated on the Call for Papers. In fact, RM-ODP is one of the standards that is trying to incorporate semantic interoperability to its model. Although often confused, components and objects can be really seen as orthogonal concepts, each one having its own specific and distinguishing features. In general, component interoperability can be seen as a particular case of object interoperability.