Meta-meaning

Published: August 3, 2007, 11:35 am

Paul Madsen puts it in a nutshell, far more neatly than I could. There's a difference between interoperability - though that is a laudable goal in itself and to be applauded - and a metasystem.A meta-language is a language for describing the characteristics of languages in general. It doesn't translate from one language to another.A meta-system provides a means of describing the characteristics of other systems and how they relate to one another. If the systems are 'players in the game', a meta-system 'stands aside from the game'.The importance of being able to make this distinction is made very clear by Mark Wahl's commentary here. For instance, he notes that issues in the Open Source Identity Selector interoperability exercise arose out of "the lack of schema management for claims, and a lack of semantic definition for claims handling". Arguably, a meta-system would proceed from definitions of elements such as that to the implementation

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