Towards pragmatic interoperability to support collaboration: A systematic review and mapping of the literature

Context: Many researchers have argued that providing interoperability support only considering the format and meaning (i.e. syntax and semantic) of data exchange is not enough to achieve complete, effective and meaningful collaboration. Pragmatic interoperability has been highlighted as a key requirement to enhance collaboration. However, fulfilling this requirement is not a trivial task and there is a lack of works discussing solutions to achieve this level of interoperability.Objectives: The aim of this study is to present a systematic review and mapping of the literature in order to identify, analyse and classify the published solutions to achieve pragmatic interoperability.Method: To conduct a systematic review and mapping in accordance with the guidelines proposed in the evidence-based software engineering literature.Results: Our study identified 13 papers reporting pragmatic interoperability computational solutions. The first paper in our set of selected papers was published in 2004; the main strategies used to address pragmatic interoperability issues were service discovery, composition and/or selection and ontologies. The application domain of the identified solutions was mainly e-business. In addition, most of the identified solutions were software architectures.Conclusion: Mature proposals addressing pragmatic interoperability are still rare in the literature. Although many works have discussed the importance of pragmatic interoperability, it is necessary that researchers report solutions that implement and evaluate pragmatic interoperability in order to make progress in this area.