Systems Interoperability Types: A Tertiary Study: Some Related Work to Bring You Up to Speed

Table of Links

Introduction

Related Work

Research Method

Results

Discussions

Conclusions & References

2 RELATED WORK

To check our work’s originality, we first looked for existing tertiary studies regarding interoperability, but none was found except our previous conference paper. Following, to find the benefits of the research method adopted in our study (i.e., tertiary study), we also searched for studies in April 2022 in ACM DL[2] , IEEE Xplore[3] , Springer[4] , ScienceDirect[5] , and DBLP[6] using the keywords "tertiary study", "tertiary studies", and "tertiary review". We found 51 studies[7] , most of them focused on software engineering.

In summary, from the first tertiary study published in 2010 [49], the quantity of studies has increased gradually; for instance, while 2011 to 2013 had three studies each year, 2021 had nine. More than half part of the studies (28 of 51) was published in journals (the preferred one is Information and Software Technology (with 15) followed by Journal of Systems and Software (5)), evidencing that tertiary studies have their value.

Most studies considered secondary studies in a 10-year time range and addressed the state of the art of a specific research topic, such as agile software engineering [40, 96], blockchain [46, 99], software reuse [11], software product line [72], and machine learning. Besides summarizing secondary studies, some presented taxonomies [100] or categorizations [5], also offering perspectives for future work.

Various works have addressed interoperability types differently, not necessarily through tertiary studies. For instance, some studies focused on specific interoperability types or models, exploring their features, benefits, and limitations [38]. Others investigated interoperability of specific software systems domains [79],[71], analyzing the challenges and opportunities related to different types of interactions. Regarding other related works, [63] analyzed systems interoperability considering new and complex software systems that support people’s daily activities, and [52] presented a comparative study of IAM.

Both studies concluded interoperability conceptualization should be revisited. Furthermore, Ford et al. [33] presented a survey of interoperability assessment and found 64 interoperability types, from which operational, organizational, and technical were the most recurrent. The authors also claimed that interoperability types and their definitions are the bases for proposing interoperability solutions and assessment models.

In 2007 when this work was published, the authors concluded interoperability is a research field that should be promoted and refined. In turn, comparing this work with ours, it is outdated, and a more detailed comparison is presented in Section 5, after presenting our results.

Finally, we can observe tertiary studies make it possible to draw comprehensive views of a specific field (and when a good number of secondary studies already exist) and help researchers identify knowledge gaps in the field. Hence, we adopted tertiary study as the research method of this work.

[2] https://dl.acm.org

[3] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org

[4] https://www.springer.com/gp

[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com 6http://dblp.org

[7] The list of tertiary studies is available in https://bit.ly/3Zb87v9