Interoperability is what lets a thermostat from one company respond to a motion sensor from another, or a factory’s machines report to a single analytics system regardless of who built them. It operates at several levels: radio and transport (can the devices reach each other?), syntax (do they agree on message formats?) and semantics (does “temperature” mean the same unit and location in both systems?). Getting the first two right is common; the third is where most integration effort goes.
Standards exist for each layer. Matter addresses the smart home, OPC UA the factory, and bodies such as oneM2M aim at cross-domain models. The trade-off for buyers is that a closed ecosystem often works better out of the box, while open standards reduce the risk of vendor lock-in over a ten-year deployment.
Part of the IoT Glossary. Spotted an error or a missing term? Tell us.