Identifying software with open standard interoperability

[Eliot Christian <echristi@usgs.gov>]

At last, it is becoming possible for U.S. government buyers of off-the 
shelf software to choose products that interoperate using open standard 
interfaces.

For example, buyers may want to select software products that display maps. 
Such a capability is available in many products using interfaces that are 
vendor-specific. But, buyers today want the great advantage of 
interoperability--access to many thousands of map resources worldwide and 
leveraging of other vendor products built to work with the open standard 
services such as  "Web Map Service". Now, the vendors will be able to 
identify which products support such standards so that buyers will be able 
to easily select those products.

This ability will follow from a "NOTE to Offers" added to instructions on 
Term Software Licenses and Perpetual Software Licenses (pages 13 and 14) of 
the GSA "Multiple Award Schedule 70":

   NOTE:  Offerors are encouraged to identify within their software items 
any component interfaces that support open standard interoperability. An 
item's interface may be identified as interoperable on the basis of 
participation in a Government agency-sponsored program or in an independent 
organization program. Interfaces may be identified by reference to an 
interface registered in the component registry located at http://www.core.gov.

(This additional NOTE was part of Solicitation No. FCIS-JB-980001-B - 
Refresh #15 issued on May 13, 2005, see 
http://fs2.eps.gov/EPSData/GSA/Synopses/13/FCIS-JB-980001-B/part1-refresh-15.doc 
).

There are many open standards for interoperability. Some are very specific 
to certain kinds of applications, but some apply very broadly, such as the 
ISO 23950 open standard for interoperable search. Given their sheer size 
and complexity, governments and other large organizations are especially 
interested in matching vendor software products that support open standard 
interfaces. Interoperability is a basic tenet of the Federal Enterprise 
Architecture (FEA) as it leverages the ongoing evolution of information 
technology toward greater modularization of complex systems. Software 
system components are now being designed to interoperate primarily through 
the passing of structured messages at interfaces designed for networking. 
The key to interoperability is that each set of operations available at 
such a component network interface is made available as a precisely-defined 
"service interface". An overall design leveraging these open standard 
services is known as a Service Oriented Architecture.