Toward Semantic Interoperability
It is common experience that many separate communities use bibliographic techniques to characterize data and information resources. Unfortunately, as each community chooses different tags for the bibliographic or metadata elements, any commonality that may actually exist gets completely obscured. The usual result is that there is no functional interoperability between the catalog services, unless some organization is able to force the communities to accept imposition of a common format. Such strong-arm tactics may be useful at times, but they are clearly inappropriate on a long-term and global scale.