I think that most people would agree that creating interoperability requires more than just having a common technical standard or using XML to create technical integration between two applications. Therefore, inspired by Park & Ram (2004) and the IDA EIF I am working on a broader definition:
Interoperability is the ability of information systems and the business processes they support to exchange data and enable sharing of information.
From a top-down perspective John Gøtze and I in our ECEG04 paper outlined the solution to the interoperability problems in government via a model where all institutions involved follow the same standardized framework for organizational, semantic and technical interoperability. But, in reality this is hard to accomplish! Thus, if anybody has a better definition of interoperability or references to good literature about the subject, please let me know.
