Towards a Conceptualisation of Interoperability Requirements

Enterprises that aim to work together want, prior to any effective collaboration, to know if they are able to interoperate. On the one hand, this induces to be able to define the particular needs having to be taken into account in order to demonstrate if an enterprise can be or must be interoperable. On the other hand, it requires techniques and approaches allowing to formalise these needs as a set of unambiguous and, as formal as possible, requirements called here interoperability requirements. Finally, verification techniques can be used to detect how and where some of these requirements cannot be satisfied. This allows to highlight interoperability problems. This paper focuses on the two first phases and describes an approach to define and to formalise interoperability needs into interoperability requirements. These requirements are decomposed on three classes named compatibility, interoperation and reversibility requirements.