The Conceptual Graph Interchange Format (CGIF) is a notation for conceptual graphs which is meant for communication between computers. CGIF is represented through a grammar that defines “on-the-wire-representations”. In this paper we argue that for interacting applications in an open distributed environment this is too inefficient both in terms of the application creation process as well as runtime characteristics. We propose to employ the widespread middleware platform based on CORBA to allow the interoperability within a heterogeneous environment. The major result of this paper is a specification of an operational interface written in CORBA's Interface Definition Language (IDL) that is equivalent to CGIF, yet better suited for the efficient implementation of applications in distributed systems.