Reflections on Legal and Organisational Interoperability at IDW2025 from Matti Heikkurinen, LOI Lead and Project Portfolio Manager, CODATA
I’ll start with a confession: until quite recently, whenever I heard the word “interoperability”, I thought of the ability of any two systems to reproduce the same bit sequence across a connecting medium (wire, fibre, or airwaves). Formidable challenge, when you consider all the possible combinations of network vendors, device types, software stacks, noise, hardware failures, and human factors at play. But the engineering community has developed standards and processes to test technical interoperability through protocol analysis, plugtests, fault-tolerant software and hardware, among others. The blackouts are rare, worms usually stay in the cans, and Cloud outages shouldn’t cause insomnia (we hope).
MoUSLA à la réalité
Travelling towards Brisbane, I had a high degree of trust in the technical and semantic interoperability of the aircraft components, backed by Byzantine Fault tolerance. I was less certain about finding pure algorithmic solutions or engineering approaches to provide complete solutions for the topics of the IDW 2025 session at the destination: Legal and Organisational Interoperability (LOI). This covers the ability of organisations not only to exchange information (Technical interoperability) and understand its meaning (Semantic interoperability), but also use the shared meaning to achieve mutually beneficial goals (Organisational interoperability) in a manner that defines and complies with the relevant legal basis for data sharing (Legal interoperability).
Two randomly connected organisations are unlikely to reproduce the same policy decisions, given their unique governance models, legal frameworks, and standard operating procedures just because they can reproduce bit sequences sent by the other party. Nevertheless, organisational and legal interoperability are crucial to society, and mechanisms to achieve mutually beneficial goals have been developed.
Read more on the CODATA blog https://codata.org/blog/2025/11/04/ode-to-loi-legal-and-organisational-interoperability-data-moves-at-the-speed-of-trust/