For communication in general it is important that person B is able to understand what person A is saying. For this common understanding one needs a common ground, a basic lexicon with an awareness of the meaning of things. From this point on one can start reasoning. In order to support scholarly communication with the use of repositories, repositories should speak the same language and it is therefore essentialto create a common ground. In technical terms we create a common ground by conducting "interoperability". Interoperability can be managed at different layers. In the DRIVER Guidelines we basically try to reach interoperability on two layers, syntactical (Use of OAI-PMH & Use of OAI_DC) and semantic (Use of Vocabularies).

Stand: November 2008