Fit for purpose: engineering principles for selecting an appropriate type of data exchange standard

Data standards are a powerful, real-world tool for enterprise interoperability, yet there exists no well-grounded methodology for selecting among alternative standards approaches. We focus on a specific sub-problem within a community’s data sharing challenge and identify four major standards-based approaches to that task. We present characteristics of a data sharing community that one should consider in selecting a standards approach—such as relative power, motivation level, and technical sophistication of different participants—and illustrate with real-world examples. These characteristics and other factors are then analyzed to develop decision rules for selecting among the four approaches. Independent of the data exchange problem, we suggest two general practices in choosing a standards approach: (1) vertical decomposition of interoperability issues, in order to define a narrow, formal, tractable problem, and (2) option-exclusion rules, as they are much simpler than stating optimal-choice rules.