Interoperability is the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together (inter-operate). The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to system performance.
While interoperability was initially defined for IT systems or services and only allows for information to be exchanged (see definition below), a more generic definition could be this one:
Interoperability is a property of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood, to work with other products or systems, present or future, without any restricted access or implementation.
This generalized definition can then be used on any system, not only information technology system. It defines several criteria that can be used to discriminate between systems that are “really” inter-operable and systems that are sold as such but are not because they don’t respect one of…