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Building information modelling (BIM) has transformed the traditional practices of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. BIM creates a collaborative digital representation of built environment data. Competitive advantage can be achieved with collaborative project delivery and rich information modelling. Despite the abundant benefits, BIM’s adoption in the AEC is susceptible to confrontation. A substantial impediment to BIM adoption often cited is data interoperability. Other facets of interoperability got limited attention. Other academic areas, including information systems, discuss the interoperability construct ahead of data interoperability. These interoperability factors have yet to be surveyed in the AEC industry. This study aims to investigate the effect of interoperability factors on BIM adoption and develop a comprehensive BIM adoption model.

The theoretical foundations of the proposed model are based on the European interoperability framework (EIF) and technology, organization, environment framework (TOE). Quantitative data collection from construction firms is gathered. The model has been thoroughly examined and validated using partial least squares structural equation modelling in SmartPLS software.

The study’s findings indicate that relative advantage, top management support, government support, organizational readiness and regulation support are determinants of BIM adoption. Financial constraints, complexity, lack of technical interoperability, semantic interoperability, organizational interoperability and uncertainty are barriers to BIM adoption. However, compatibility, competitive pressure and legal interoperability do not affect BIM adoption.

Finally, this study provides recommendations containing the essential technological, organizational, environmental and interoperability factors that AEC stakeholders can address to enhance BIM adoption.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first studies to combine TOE and EIF in a single research model. This research provides empirical evidence for using the proposed model as a guide to promoting BIM adoption. As a result, the highlighted determinants can assist organizations in developing and executing successful policies that support BIM adoption in the AEC industry.

Delay in the clinical information system (CIS) restoration overseeing critical health-care operations after an unexpected data loss can be fatal for patients under care. Investment in information technology (IT) capabilities and synergy between various computerized systems has been argued as the resilient information system's enablers. The purpose of this study is to empirically quantify the influence of IT investment, integration and interoperability in recovering the CIS from a data disaster.

An archival dataset sourced from a European Commission-sponsored survey of 773 hospitals across 30 countries in Europe is utilized to study the relationships. The study adopts a quasi-experimental research design approach where sample observations are weighted based on their propensity to be selected in treatment groups. The artificial weighing allows attaining a pseudo-random sample to counter the effects of selection bias.

The study finds that hospitals with more than 5% of the budget dedicated to IT have 100% higher odds of recovering immediately from a critical data loss in comparison to those that have less than 1% investment in IT. The greater extent of IT integration significantly reduces the time to recover the CIS, while interoperability problems at the organizational level lessen the odds of immediate recovery by 19%. Interoperability problems at the technical and semantic levels do not significantly impact recovery times of the CIS.

The study proposes several empirically quantified and scientifically tested recommendations for health-care providers for faster restoration of critical CIS operations post data loss. The differential impact of the interoperability problems at the technical, semantic and organizational levels has also been highlighted.

Digital health care has emerged as one of the most important means to deliver integrated care by care providers in recent years. As the use of digital health increases, there are some pressing issues such as interoperability of data across different healthcare information systems, regulatory environment and security and privacy of patient’s information which need to be discussed and addressed in order to reduce information silos and to ensure efficient and seamless use of digital health technologies. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

In this paper the authors outline the key concepts of interoperability, key challenges pertaining in achieving interoperability and concepts of security and privacy in context of digital health models of integrated care.

The study suggests that standardization of digital health information systems and connecting existing systems to health network, addressing privacy and security related issues through a comprehensive but supportive regulatory environment and educating citizens and healthcare providers are some of the ways to achieve effective use of digital health in models of integrated care.

Although the concepts of privacy and interoperability are not new, however, as per best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to discuss the challenges and possible actions to meet the objective of achieving integrated care through digital innovation.

Mashups have been studied extensively in the literature; nevertheless, the large body of work in this area focuses on service/data level integration and leaves UI level integration, hence UI mashups, almost unexplored. The latter generates digital environments in which participating sources exist as individual entities; member applications and data sources share the same graphical space particularly in the form of widgets. However, the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. The authors call such an integration “widget orchestration” and the resulting application “mashup by orchestration”. This article aims to explore and address challenges regarding the realization of widget‐based UI mashups and UI level integration, prominently in terms of widget orchestration, and to assess their suitability for building web‐based personal environments.

The authors provide a holistic view on mashups and a theoretical grounding for widget‐based personal environments. The authors identify the following challenges: widget interoperability, end‐user data mobility as a basis for manual widget orchestration, user behavior mining – for extracting behavioral patterns – as a basis for automated widget orchestration, and infrastructure. The authors introduce functional widget interfaces for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and realize end‐user data mobility on top of this interoperability framework. The authors employ semantically enhanced workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user behavior mining. The authors outline a reference platform and architecture that is compliant with the authors' strategies, and extend W3C widget specification respectively – prominently with a communication channel – to foster standardization. The authors evaluate their solution approaches regarding interoperability and infrastructure through a qualitative comparison with respect to existing literature, and provide a computational evaluation of the behavior mining approach. The authors realize a prototype for a widget‐based personal learning environment for foreign language learning to demonstrate the feasibility of their solution strategies. The prototype is also used as a basis for the end‐user assessment of widget‐based personal environments and widget orchestration.

The evaluation results suggest that the interoperability framework, platform, and architecture have certain advantages over existing approaches, and the proposed behavior mining techniques are adequate for the extraction of behavioral patterns. User assessments show that widget‐based UI mashups with orchestration (i.e. mashups by orchestration) are promising for the creation of personal environments as well as for an enhanced user experience.

This article provides an extensive exploration of mashups by orchestration and their role in the creation of personal environments. Key challenges are described, along with novel solution strategies to meet them.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how, despite increasing data availability from a wide range of sources unlocks unprecedented opportunities for disaster risk reduction, data interoperability remains a challenge due to a number of barriers. As a first step to enhancing data interoperability for disaster risk reduction is to identify major barriers, this paper presents a case study on data interoperability in disaster risk reduction in Europe, linking current barriers to the regional initiative of the European Science and Technology Advisory Group.

In support of Priority 2 (“Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk”) of the Sendai Framework and SDG17 (“Partnerships for the goals”), this paper presents a case study on barriers to data interoperability in Europe based on a series of reviews, surveys and interviews with National Sendai Focal Points and stakeholders in science and research, governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations and industry.

For a number of European countries, there remains a clear imbalance between long-term disaster risk reduction and short-term preparation and the dominant role of emergency relief, response and recovery, pointing to the potential of investments in ex ante measures with better inclusion and exploitation of data.

Modern society is facing a digital revolution. As highlighted by the International Council of Science and the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, digital technology offers profound opportunities for science to discover unsuspected patterns and relationships in nature and society, on scales from the molecular to the cosmic, from local health systems to global sustainability. It has created the potential for disciplines of science to synergize into a holistic understanding of the complex challenges currently confronting humanity; the Sustainable Development Goals are a direct reflectance of this. Interdisciplinary is obtained with integration of data across relevant disciplines. However, a barrier to realization and exploitation of this potential arises from the incompatible data standards and nomenclatures used in different disciplines. Although the problem has been addressed by several initiatives, the following challenge still remains: to make online data integration a routine.

This report aims to present the state of play of semantic interoperability problems in social security data exchanges.

The subject is presented as an open issue and taking into account the circumstances of the exchanges. Electronic exchanges in European Union social security are used as a case study.

Semantic level of these exchanges seems to be the weakness and the use of controlled vocabularies is proposed as possible solution. The creation and maintenance of metadata sets are finally considered as a compromise solution.

The article proposes a solution for the current semantic problems in electronic exchanges of social security information. The solution could be useful for social security institutions all over the world.

This work focuses on the interoperability of the blockchain from the viewpoint of its technological evolution in the wider context of supply chain systems. Interoperability concerns the most since it is among the most persevering problems in the process of blockchain adaptation. The study aims to trace and pinpoint all the different methods that affect the interoperability of blockchains, gather all the obtainable evidence and recognize gaps in between the applicable approaches mentioned across the contemporary academic literature.

An analysis is done of seven interoperability approaches based on their relevance, practical usefulness and adoption processes concerning the blockchain. Mainly, this work examines interoperability from several different perspectives. An interoperability modular decomposition via a layered model has been defined through the level of conceptual interoperability (LCIM) and level of information system interoperability (LISI), which represent the most popular metrics with regard to assessing the level of interoperability from a qualitative level.

Generally, the findings of this work are directed in two major aspects: Firstly, it expands the research around blockchain technology interoperability by providing crucial background information and pinpointing important connotations for both industrial and academic environments. It also defines and analyzes several different approaches toward the blockchain platform's interoperability. Secondly, it also identifies and proposes several scenarios that take advantage of multiple blockchain application approaches, highlights various issues and challenges to the evolution of interoperability standards and solutions and indicates the desired areas of further research.

An essential aspect of the originality of this paper is that, contrary to other work contributions, this work summarized the different interoperability approaches for blockchain in supply chain systems. Mainly, seven approaches were discussed for practitioners and researchers, and the open issues and future research direction were considered.

Information from Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) is stored in different formats, in platforms that are not compatible, or even in independent networks. It would be helpful to have a well-defined methodology to allow for management data processing from a single site, so as to take advantage of the capacity to link disperse data found in different systems, platforms, sources and/or formats. Based on functionalities and materials of the VLIR project, the purpose of this paper is to present a model that provides for interoperability by means of semantic alignment techniques and metadata crosswalks, and facilitates the fusion of information stored in diverse sources.

After reviewing the state of the art regarding the diverse mechanisms for achieving semantic interoperability, the paper analyzes the following: the specific coverage of the data sets (type of data, thematic coverage and geographic coverage); the technical specifications needed to retrieve and analyze a distribution of the data set (format, protocol, etc.); the conditions of re-utilization (copyright and licenses); and the “dimensions” included in the data set as well as the semantics of these dimensions (the syntax and the taxonomies of reference). The semantic interoperability framework here presented implements semantic alignment and metadata crosswalk to convert information from three different systems (ABCD, Moodle and DSpace) to integrate all the databases in a single RDF file.

The paper also includes an evaluation based on the comparison – by means of calculations of recall and precision – of the proposed model and identical consultations made on Open Archives Initiative and SQL, in order to estimate its efficiency. The results have been satisfactory enough, due to the fact that the semantic interoperability facilitates the exact retrieval of information.

The proposed model enhances management of the syntactic and semantic interoperability of the CRIS system designed. In a real setting of use it achieves very positive results.

The purpose of this study is to examine the position of interoperability of government and corporate portals in technological adoption space in India in terms of three critical dimensions: data integration, process integration and communication integration.

This exploratory study was conducted through a survey questionnaire from 300 portals of government departments and public sector undertakings (PSUs) in India. Data were also collected from portals of Indian companies and the results have been compared with those of the government portals.

The results show that the majority of government portals in India have initiated integration. Second, the portals of Indian companies are performing better than the portals of government and PSUs for achieving an interoperable position. Third, there is high dispersion in level of integration of government portals in India.

The portals with the lowest level of integration in government in India will determine when government will actually attain full horizontal integration and hence achieve an interoperable portal as there is high dispersion in level of integration of government portals in India. Also, for achieving an interoperable government portal, an organization needs to focus on the weakest factors of each dimension.

This study is the first to examine the position of interoperability in technological adoption space in India. The results lead to a number of recommendations for achieving interoperability for government portals in India. The study also highlights the weakest factors of each dimension that require more improvement than other factors.

A huge amount of diverse data is generated in the Internet of Things (IoT) because of heterogeneous devices like sensors, actuators, gateways and many more. Due to assorted nature of devices, interoperability remains a major challenge for IoT system developers. The purpose of this study is to use mapping techniques for converting relational database (RDB) to resource directory framework (RDF) for the development of ontology. Ontology helps in achieving semantic interoperability in application areas of IoT which results in shared/common understanding of the heterogeneous data generated by the diverse devices used in health-care domain.

To overcome the issue of semantic interoperability in healthcare domain, the authors developed an ontology for patients having cardio vascular diseases. Patients located at any place around the world can be diagnosed by Heart Experts located at another place by using this approach. This mechanism deals with the mapping of heterogeneous data into the RDF format in an integrated and interoperable manner. This approach is used to integrate the diverse data of heart patients needed for diagnosis with respect to cardio vascular diseases. This approach is also applicable in other fields where IoT is mostly used.

Experimental results showed that the RDF works better than the relational database for semantic interoperability in the IoT. This concept-based approach is better than key-based approach and reduces the computation time and storage of the data.

The proposed approach helps in overcoming the demerits of relational database like standardization, expressivity, provenance and supports SPARQL. Therefore, it helps to overcome the heterogeneity, thereby enabling the semantic interoperability in IoT.