ISO Standards for Interoperability: a comparison1

The lack of interoperability between ICT systems is becoming more and more a bottleneck in the collaboration and co-operation of enterprises. Cooperating parties have to exchange business information and have to have the same understanding of the meaning of the exchanged information and to trust both the communication itself and the validity of its contents. The paper reviews two ISO standards, which are aiming on the interoperability issue comparing the different aspects of these standards and introduces a new work item in standardisation, which expects support from two current European initiatives on interoperability and others. The paper is intended to guide further standard developments by identifying current solutions and their relation with one an-