The third panel here in Prague -- "Standards, Interoperability and Intellectual Property Rights" -- most reminded me of our Milan event last year, and that's a good thing. I got to hear Jim discuss standards, open source, the Free and Open Source Software movement, and of course 19th Century railroads. The prepared text of his presentation is posted here.

Also interesting was Stephen McGibbon, a Microsoft official based in Manchester. Policymakers, he said, focus a great deal on technical interoperability. But he said in the world of PCs, servers and the Internet, technical interoperability issues are rare. There are other, more important complications, however. One is legal interoperability. As an example, he said there's a move afoot in the EU to develop a high-tech ID that, say, an Austrian could use in the UK. But McGibbon noted that the UK wouldn't legally recognize it regardless of its technical design, and France and Germany have laws against issuing numerical IDs. The more colorful example was a semantic interoperability issue. Many of us remember when NASA's Mars Explorer crashed on the Red Planet in 1999 because it was sent commands in Imperial units when it was expecting metric commands. That was not a technical interoperability issue, McGibbon said, but a semantic one. Both sets of numbers would have worked, but there was a "language" barrier between engineer and spacecraft.

Oh, and McGibbon didn't stick to the space age. He also discussed 19th Century railroads, opening his presentation addressing the selection of track width in the UK and the US.