Interoperability and semantics - An introduction into the past and a look at the future

Interoperability is a qualitative property of computing infrastructures that denotes the ability of the sending and receiving systems to exchange and properly interpret information objects across system boundaries. Since this property is not given by default, the interoperability problem involves the representation of meaning and has been an active research topic for approximately four decades. Early database models such as the Relational Model used schemas to express semantics and implicitly aimed at achieving interoperability by providing programming independence from data storage and access. After a number of intermediate steps such as Object Oriented Data Bases and Semi - Structured Data like Hypertext and XML document models, the notions of semantics and interoperability became what they have been over the last ten years in the context of theWorldWideWeb and more recently the concept of Open Linked Data. The invited talk, where this paper is just an extended abstract, concentrates on the early history but also investigates the (reoccurring) problem of interoperability as it can be found in the massive data collections of today, such as the Open Linked Data and Data Cloud concepts. We investigate semantics and interoperability research from the point of view of Information Systems and not from AI and Information Mining. We give a brief overview of existing old and new interoperability techniques and point out future research directions, especially for concepts found in Open Linked Data and the Semantic WEB.