Interoperability as Symbiosis

This post is part of a series that translates ecological narratives, biological concepts and field notes into analytical tools for libraries, archives, and museums, related to knowledge and memory management. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Beyond the Technical Horizon

For more than three decades, the concept of interoperability has served as a cornerstone of digital librarianship and archival informatics. It has promised connection: a world in which data, metadata, and documents circulate freely across platforms, institutions, and disciplines. But, in practice, interoperability has often been reduced to a technical achievement: the successful alignment of schemas, protocols, and APIs. Its ethical and epistemic implications have remained largely underdeveloped.

This reduction has produced systems that can communicate syntactically but not semantically — exchanging information without sharing understanding. Libraries and archives now inhabit networks that are technically linked but epistemically fragmented. The field's challenge is not how to connect more, but how to connect well: how to build infrastructures that sustain relational integrity rather than merely transactional exchange.

This post argues that interoperability must be redefined as symbiosis. It is not simply a property of systems, but an ecological condition of mutual dependency and transformation among institutions, data, and users. To speak of symbiosis is to treat connection as a form of care — an ethics of co-existence in which the survival of information depends on the vitality of its relations.

The Limits of Mechanical Interoperability

Interoperability emerged from the information-engineering paradigm of the late twentieth century. Its central metaphors were pipelines, interfaces, and standards, which privileged flow, uniformity, and control. The success of a system was measured by its ability to transfer data without friction. This instrumental view shaped the design of metadata standards, repository architectures, and linked-data frameworks from MARC to RDF.

While effective at ensuring technical compatibility, such models have reproduced the logic of industrial efficiency within cultural infrastructures. They assume that knowledge can be decomposed into discrete units, transported without loss, and recombined under universal protocols. However, memory institutions do not manage neutral data: they manage situated meaning. The translation of cultural, linguistic, and ethical complexity into uniform metadata inevitably entails epistemic loss.

Mechanical interoperability therefore achieves connectivity at the cost of context. It produces networks that are open in structure but closed in interpretation — systems that can link everything and understand nothing. The field's next step must be conceptual, not technical: to move from interoperability as coordination to interoperability as relation.

Interdependence as Infrastructure

Every library, archive, and museum exists within a dense web of interdependence. Records cross institutional boundaries; metadata is reused, remixed, and reinterpreted; authority files borrow from shared vocabularies; users become co-curators through annotation and reuse. The infrastructure of memory is not a collection of isolated silos but a living mesh of mutual reliance.

Recognizing this condition requires an ontological shift. Instead of conceiving repositories as autonomous entities that occasionally interact, we must understand them as participants in a continuous ecology of information. Their stability arises not from isolation but from circulation. Redundancy, overlap, and contextual negotiation are not inefficiencies but mechanisms of resilience.

This perspective dissolves the false opposition between autonomy and connection. Independence does not mean detachment; it means the capacity to maintain identity within relation. For librarianship, this translates into a model of institutional individuality grounded in interoperability — an ecosystem in which each node contributes to, and depends upon, the vitality of the whole.

From Provenance to Polyprovenance

Traditional archival theory defined provenance as a singular lineage: a record's authority derived from its origin within a specific creator or institutional body. In networked environments, that model no longer holds. Records now emerge, evolve, and circulate across multiple agents and contexts. Metadata itself accumulates layers of authorship: catalogers, digitizers, aggregators, algorithms, and users all leave interpretive traces.

The reality of digital documentation is therefore polyprovenancial. Meaning arises not from a single source but from overlapping contributions. To treat provenance as a fixed attribute is to deny the collaborative nature of record formation in the digital era.

Designing for polyprovenance means developing systems capable of expressing shared custodianship, versioning across institutions, and relational histories of use. It also means acknowledging that authority is no longer declarative but negotiated. The integrity of a record lies not in its unbroken lineage but in the transparency of its transformations.

Metadata as Relationship

Metadata has long been treated as description: a secondary layer added to an object to facilitate discovery and management. This hierarchical view assumes that records exist independently of their metadata and that description merely reports on them. However, in digital environments, metadata increasingly is the object. It mediates identity, determines visibility, and governs access.

A relational understanding reframes metadata as the connective tissue of the information ecosystem. Every element — an identifier, a subject term, a link — is a bridge through which meaning travels. Metadata does not describe from the outside; it participates from within.

Such a perspective demands new forms of design. Instead of rigid schemas that enforce uniformity, we require relational ontologies that allow partial overlap and semantic negotiation. A record's description should be able to evolve as it interacts with new contexts. The aim is not standardization but translation: a system capable of maintaining coherence through difference.

This approach also repositions librarians and archivists as mediators of relation rather than controllers of order. Their work shifts from enforcing compliance to cultivating interoperability as an interpretive practice — a continuous balancing of connection, autonomy, and change.

Designing for Translation

True interoperability is a problem of translation, not of transport. It concerns the capacity of systems to interpret one another's meanings while preserving difference. Translation requires flexibility, contextual awareness, and mutual adaptation — qualities rarely present in rigid technical standards.

Designing for translation entails several strategic shifts:

• Context-sensitive schemas that allow optional, locally defined fields rather than enforcing global uniformity.
• Layered vocabularies that map relations between divergent terminologies without forcing equivalence.
• Feedback mechanisms through which users and institutions can report mismatches and contribute new relational mappings.
• Temporal metadata capable of expressing change over time, acknowledging that relations, not just data, have life cycles.

These strategies treat interoperability as an evolving dialogue rather than a fixed agreement. The goal is not to build permanent bridges but to maintain responsive pathways — channels of translation that adapt as knowledge ecosystems evolve.

Resilient Interoperability

Digital preservation has traditionally sought permanence: the assurance that information will endure unchanged. Yet stability in living systems arises not from immutability but from adaptability. In ecology, resilience is the capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganize without collapse. Applied to information environments, resilience implies that data systems must be designed to tolerate partial failure, redundancy, and change.

Resilient interoperability embraces decay and transformation as part of informational life. Deprecated formats, obsolete standards, and derivative copies are not errors to be eliminated but residues of adaptation. Each represents a historical layer of the network's metabolism. Rather than erasing these traces, resilient systems document them — making the history of linkage visible as a dimension of meaning.

Such an approach dissolves the binary between preservation and obsolescence. It treats continuity as a process of renewal: data survives not by remaining identical but by remaining in relation.

Professional Reorientation

A shift from mechanical to symbiotic interoperability might transform professional identity. Librarians, archivists, and data curators would cease to be custodians of static repositories and become designers of relational environments. Their expertise would lie in maintaining balance within complex networks, ensuring that connections remain meaningful, reciprocal, and sustainable.

This reorientation may redefine the values of the profession. Authority would become relational rather than hierarchical; quality would become a measure of coherence across systems rather than compliance with a single norm; access would become participatory rather than unilateral. The professional task would be to sustain diversity without fragmentation, and connectivity without homogenization.

Training for this role would certainly require new literacies: fluency in semantic technologies, but also in ethics, negotiation, and ecological reasoning. To curate digital memory today is to manage living systems of relation — infrastructures that demand continuous attention rather than static control.

A Mycelial Ethics of Knowledge

The metaphor of symbiosis captures the essence of this new orientation. In living networks, cooperation and competition coexist; stability emerges from interaction, not dominance. Information systems, too, must learn to survive through mutual adaptation.

A mycelial ethics of knowledge rests on three propositions:

• Everything is relational. No dataset, record, or institution stands alone; meaning exists only through connection.
• Care is infrastructural. The design of interoperability determines the health of the information ecosystem; neglect produces epistemic erosion.
• Transformation is continuity. Preservation depends on the capacity to change while retaining relation.

To build memory systems under these principles is to align librarianship with the logic of life itself: distributed, adaptive, and co-dependent. Such a vision does not romanticize nature; it recognizes that the future of digital heritage depends on the cultivation of living relations between data, people, and institutions.

Nothing Stands Alone

Interoperability, reimagined as symbiosis, becomes more than a technical specification. It is an epistemic stance: a commitment to relational existence within the infrastructures of memory. Libraries, archives, and museums will endure not by guarding their boundaries but by nurturing the connections that give them meaning.

To preserve is to participate; to describe is to relate; to link is to care. The systems we build will inherit the ethics we encode into their relations. If they are designed for extraction, they will exhaust their environments. If they are designed for reciprocity, they will endure.

Nothing in the ecology of knowledge stands alone. Interoperability, understood as the art of living together, is the profession's most urgent form of responsibility.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "Nothing Stands Alone," a narrative reflection on the same theme.