The word "interoperable" is correct and usable in written English.
It is an adjective used to describe a system or device that is able to work with other systems or devices without special effort, and is used to describe a situation where different computer systems, software programs, and data formats are able to communicate and exchange data. For example, "The new software upgrade enables our systems to be interoperable with other systems in the organization."
For years, handset makers have licensed patents to each other so they can make interoperable products.
Innovations that marry the digital and energy disciplines are widespread, including technology that controls the energy consumption of buildings and interoperable communicating devices - such as temperature and air quality sensors, variable speed drives and robots, as well as smart meters and intensity and colour controlled LED lighting.
But, at least in theory, it should be possible to push together Clearnet, Clearstream, Crest and the LCH, either through a formal merger or by making them "interoperable" (the buzzword of the moment).The trouble is that those vested interests get in the way.
Supporters and opponents of the manifesto met at a conference in New York this week and agreed "on a shared goal to promote the use and awareness of open and interoperable cloud computing", as one participant put it.
He has even appointed a "national co-ordinator for health information technology" to create a fully interoperable, nationwide network within ten years.
We are actively encouraging this with an emphasis on flexible, deployable, and technologically advanced and interoperable forces.
For even though it is fine to start hoping for the day when interoperable electronic health records create vast pools of medical information that could be used to find new cures and battle epidemics in real time, their ultimate purpose is to make one simple and shockingly overdue change: to enable individuals, at last, to have access to, and possession of, information about their own health.
Writing in Health Affairs, an American journal, in January, Jan Walker and five colleagues (including Mr Bates) at the Centre for Information Technology Leadership in Boston concluded that a fully interoperable network of electronic health records would yield $77.8 billion a year in net benefits, or 5% of America's annual health-care spending.
In mass-transit RFID cards, the chips and readers are designed and sold as a package, and even in the case of retailing they are carefully designed to be interoperable.
But as the industry matures and interoperable standards emerge, it is likely that the biometrics hardware and software used for one application could equally well be used for others.For example, fingerprint sensors on laptops often come with software that lets the user run a "password safe".
There had been a plan for a cheap little plug-in module that would enable one company to beam its services into the other's box, but it has not yet materialised.The reason why the boxes are not interoperable is that the companies do not want them to be.
