Glossary

ARPA (DARPA): The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). It manages and directs selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursues research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions and dual-use application.
Broad System of Ordering (BSO): A general subject classification scheme, commissioned by UNESCO, intended to be a switching language among existing classification schemes and thesauri to make them mutually compatible on a general level. It provides about 4,000 subdivisions.
Collection Interface Agent: A program which interacts with the Collection Registry. For searchable collections (Z39.50, FTL, ...) it takes care of talking to the remote collection, submitting searches, fetching and processing results. It is also referred to as a CIA or a collection agent.
Collection Registry: The database in which descriptions of collections are stored.
Concept Space: Graph of terms occurring within objects linked to each other by the frequency with which they occur together.
Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI): A non-profit organization dedicated to formulating, planning, and carrying out national-level research initiatives on the use of network-based information technology. CNRI is concentrating on research and development for the National Information Infrastructure, working collaboratively with industry, academia, and government.
Derived Data: Data that was originally supplied in one form, but was converted to another form using some automated process.
DID: Document Image Decoding, a methodology for document recognition founded on statistical communication theory.
Digital Libraries: Digital libraries basically store materials in electronic format and manipulate large collections of those materials effectively.
Digital Library Federation: The Federation is comprised of leaders of fifteen of the nation's largest research libraries and archives and the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA). A primary goal of the Federation is the implementation of a distributed, open digital library accessible across the global Internet. The library will consist of collections expanding over time in number and scope to be created from the conversion of digital form of documents contained in founding member and other libraries and archives, and from the incorporation of holdings already in electronic form.
DLI: Digital Libraries Initiative. Six research projects developing new technologies for digital libraries -- storehouses of information available through the Internet, -funded through a joint initiative of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The projects' focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks -- all in user-friendly ways.
ESRI: Environmental Systems Research Institute
European Digital Library Consortium (ERCIM): The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase cooperation with European industry. Leading research establishments from fourteen European countries are members of ERCIM.
Federated Repositories: Organized collections (heterogeneous databases) located in different places but searched transparently as one database via merging and mapping (federating).
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. An SGML-based text markup language used on the WWW (World Wide Web).
IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force - an all volunteer organization responsible for publishing RFCs and Internet Standards.
IIPA: International Intellectual Property Alliance.
IITA: Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications
IITF: Information Infrastructure Task Force.
Information Visualization: A method of presenting data or information in non-traditional, interactive graphical forms. By using 2-D or 3-D color graphics and animation, these visualizations can show the structure of information, allow one to navigate through it, and modify it with graphical interactions.
Intellectual Property Usage License: The authority to employ a particular intellectual work in a designated way, possibly associated with other specifications of scope.
Intellectual Work: The object requiring an intellectual property usage license (i.e., an authored document). This object has an associated individual or agent with authority to grant such licenses.
Interoperability: The ability of software and hardware on multiple machines from multiple vendors to communicate.
Interspace: The Interspace is a vision of what the Internet will become, where users cross-correlate information in multiple ways from multiple sources. It is an applications environment for interconnecting spaces to manipulate information, much as the Internet is a protocol environment for interconnecting networks to transmit data. Navigating information paths and grouping related items is a fundamental operation. So is semantic retrieval and community classification, with interactive support for vocabulary switching across domains and subject indexing for amateur classifiers.
IR: Information Retrieval
ISO 12083: The new international standard for electronic manuscript preparation and markup. ISO 12083 speeds computerized text from author to publisher to typesetter without retyping and transforms the document into a searchable database.
JAVA: Java is a simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture-neutral, portable, high-performance, multithreaded, dynamic, buzzword-compliant, general-purpose programming language.
Machine Learning: The ability of a machine to improve its performance based on previous results.
Magic Lenses: This is an idea out of Xerox PARC where a region of the display (the "lens"), positioned by the mouse, is rendered in a special way. Lenses are specialized local views which might show labels where none were before, or handles on objects, or highlight certain subsets of items.
Metadata: Data about data. Includes information describing aspects of actual data items, such as name, format, content, and the control of or over data.
Middleware: Software that mediates between an applications program and a network. It manages the interaction between disparate applications across the heterogeneous computing platforms. The Object Request Broker (ORB), software that manages communication between objects, is an example of a middleware program.
Multiple View User Interface: Multiple views means that phrases can be drag-and-drop across each individual interface for each information source.
Multivalent Document (MVD): A single document made of multiple layers of difference but intimately related material. Each layer is of homogeneous content, but is of a relatively limited scope and functionality. Layers have dynamically loaded program objects associated with them called behaviors, that manipulate the content, often communicating with other layers and other behaviors to achieve a desired effect.
NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA's mission is to advance and communicate scientific knowledge and understanding of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe and use the environment of space for research.
NetBill: The NetBill project at CMU's Information Networking Institute is designing the protocols and software to support network-based payment for goods and services delivered over the Internet. NetBill acts as a third party to provide authentication, account management, transaction processing, billing, and reporting services for network-based clients and users.
NII: National Information Infrastructure.
NSF: National Science Foundation. An independent agency of the U.S. government with the mission of promoting science and engineering.
NTIA: National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Responsible for the Information Superhighway.
OCR: Optical Character Recognition
Ontology: An explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them.
PAD++: Software which provides a virtual infinite extent, infinitely zoomable work surface, being developed under an ARPA grant at the University of New Mexico. Its multiscale interface, allowing interaction at many scales, is expected to allow the visualization of large scale information structures, and the organization of large and complex work activities. It is integrated with the Tcl/Tk prototyping environment and is being used as the development platform for the University of Michigan's Advanced User Interface (AUI).
PAT: Indexing software developed by the OpenText Corp. which serves as the basis for its products used for searching the WWW, intranets, etc.
Portals: Windows on a zooming work surface which can be used to bring distant regions close, to give simultaneous views at multiple scales, or, when given special active functionality, to create Magic lenses.
Query Planning Agent: A kind of Task Planning Agent. In many contexts, this means task planners who specialize in query tasks. Some select only from a library of existing plans for executing queries, others construct new plans.
Registration: The process of adding new descriptions to the registry database.
Registry Database: The database in which descriptions of agents (including collections) are stored. Also called the Conspectus database or the registry.
Remora Agents: An agent which, given a URL, will check the links of a homepage at a specified interval of time, check a specified homepage for any changes in the homepage at a specified interval and notify the user of any changes, and/or search a specified homepage for key phrases, results of which are emailed to the user.
Scaffolding: This concept is based on the idea that at the beginning of learning, students need a great deal of support, gradually, this support is taken away to allow students to try their independence. Providing support takes place in a number of ways - the way in which the selections are organized in a theme, the amount of prior knowledge activation that is provided, the way in which the literature is read by students, and the types of responses students are encouraged to make.
Semantic Retrieval: Searching for words within a concept space (graph of terms occurring within objects linked to each other by the frequency with which they occur together).
Semantic Zooming: In a multiscale interface like PAD++, normal, geometric zooming simply changes the size of objects in the view. In semantic zooming, objects change appearance or shape as they change size. For example, a growing dot will become a simple box, then a box with a one-word label, then a box with a longer label, then a rectangle filled with text and pictures. The goal is to give the most meaningful presentation at each size.
SGML: Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML is a platform-neutral standard for creating documents and information archives--it's a series of rules that everyone can follow in order to make their documents publishable in different media (print, CD-ROM, the Web) and to make their documents readable with different kinds of computers. SGML is also a structure for storing information which eases information-management and manipulation. It supports very powerful searching and allows large information repositories to be repurposed, broken down, and rearranged intelligently into individual documents. For more information, see SGML info.
Testbed: A platform on which an assortment of experimental tools and products may be deployed and allowed to interact in real-time. Successful tools and products may be identified and developed in an interactive, evolutionary, interdependent process.
TextTiles: TextTiling is a method for partitioning full-length text documents into coherent multi-paragraph units.
Thesaurus: A controlled vocabulary with a syndetic structure within a circumscribed subject field used to organize material or information.
TileBars: An interface for document that allows the user to make informed decisions about which documents to view based on the distribution of search terms in the document.
URC: Uniform Resource Characteristic
Uniform Resource Citation: A collection of attribute/values about an object. Some of the values may be URIs. URCs are not formally defined, yet.
URI: Universal Resource Identifier - an address of some sort. See IETF URI-WG and the W3.org.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are a particular kind of URI.
URN: Uniform Resource Name. URNs are another kind of URI. Names are more persistent than Locations. A location may change, but a name rarely will.
Vocabulary Switching: The mapping of vocabulary from one discipline onto the vocabulary of another discipline.
Z39.50: The American National Standard Information Retrieval Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification for Open Systems Interconnection. The National Information Standards Institute (NISO), an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited standards developer that serves the library, information, and publishing communities, approved the original standard in 1988 (referred to as Z39.50-1988 or Version 1). NISO published a revised version of the standard in 1992 (Z30.50-1992 or Version 2). ANSI/NISO Z39.50 defines a standard way for two computers to communicate for the purpose of information retrieval. Z39.50 makes it easier to use large information databases by standardizing the procedures and features for searching and retrieving information. Specifically, Z39.50 supports information retrieval in a distributed, client and server environment where a computer operating as a client submits a search request (query) to another computer acting as an information server. Software on the server performs a search on one or more databases and creates a set of records that meet the criteria of the search request as a result. The server returns records from the resulting set to the client for processing. The power of Z39.50 is that it separates the user interface on the client side from the information servers, search engines, and databases. Z39.50 provides a consistent view of information from a wide variety of sources and offers client implementers the capability to integrate information from a range of databases and servers.

The Acronym Expander | Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Digital Libraries Initiative
Comments to: External Relations Coordinator, Tom Habing
11/23/98