Standards have an important part to play
in the implementation of the framework
proposed here. Given that the idea is to enable people implementing systems to make
use of components that can be selected from a variety of sources standards are critical
to ensuring that components will work together.
Standards exist at a variety of levels,
and we are not concerned here with the low-level
standards (such as IP which belong to the institutional infrastructure layer). However,
there are standards at the other levels which are important to ensure that systems will
indeed interoperate. Data must be presented in a format which is understood by
services that are consuming it in the way that was intended by the services presenting it;
this covers the way in which it is transported, the formats that are used and the
vocabularies. Without standards for each of these each agreement between producing
and consuming services would have to be ad hoc and this grows exponentially and
rapidly become unsupportable.
