Interoperability is the ability of different computer systems, applications, and services to exchange data, "talk" to each other, and use the information they've exchanged transparently for the user.
In an organization that maintains outdoor assets, interoperability is what prevents "information silos" (where the CMMS knows nothing about the ERP that invoices or the plant's monitoring system).
Types of Interoperability
- Semantic: Both systems understand the data in the same way (e.g., defining what a "serious incident" is).
- Technical: Systems can physically connect (via API, Web Services, standard files).
How Maptainer integrates
Unlike monolithic solutions that try to do everything, Maptainer focuses on maintaining outdoor assets and integrates with the systems the customer already has through documented channels:
- Public REST API, documented in Swagger and ReDoc without a key, with paginated reads, incremental sync, and full export, to feed an ERP, a corporate GIS, or a dashboard.
- Incident creation via the API, so an ERP or a notification system can report a fault and Maptainer handles it with its SLA, work order, and closure.
- Outgoing webhooks, which notify other systems when work orders and incidents are created or change status.
- Connections to external REST APIs, to import an inventory that lives in another system and keep it up to date.
- Geographic standards: import from GeoPackage, Shapefile, GeoJSON, DXF, and CSV, and third-party WMS layers.
It doesn't force the customer to change their ecosystem: it connects to it through these channels. Maptainer does not invoice; it hands cost and execution data to the systems that do.