Social and Solidarity Economy Web Information Systems: State of the Art and an Interoperability Framework

This paper presents the state of the art on interoperability developments for the social and solidarity economy (SSE) community web based information systems (WIS); it also presents a framework of interoperability for the SSE' WIS and the developments made in a research-in-progress PhD project in the last 3 years. A search on the bibliographic databases showed that so far there are no papers on interoperability initiatives on the SSE, so it was necessary to have other sources of information: a preliminary analysis of the WIS that support SSE activities; and interviews with the representatives of some of the world's most important SSE organisations. The study showed that the WIS are still not interoperable yet. In order to become interoperable a group of the SSE community has been developing a Dublin Corre Application Profile to be used by the SSE community as reference and binding to describe their resources. This paper also describes this on-going process.