Glossary

Cellular Repository

An information repository with a layered architecture. Each layer may be implemented by a multitude of modules (cells), which are designed to work together.

CORBA

Common Object Request Broker Architecture. CORBA is defined and managed by the OMG (Object Management Group).

COS

Common Object Services (a CORBA term)

Federated Information Sources

Information sources which are used together, but which are not under a single authority. Federated information sources are therefore not necessarily willing or equipped to participate in common communication protocols, such as transaction support.

GLOSS

GlOSS is a system developed at Stanford University that helps you find data sources that are relevant to your queries.

HCI

Human Computer Interaction. Also known as CHI, as in 'the CHI Conference'.

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. www.ietf.org

IIPA

International Intellectual Property Alliance.

IITA

Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications

IITF

Information Infrastructure Task Force See iitf.doc.gov.

ILU

Inter language Unification - a mechanism for implementing distributed objects across heterogeneous languages. An almost CORBA compliant ORB. Freely available from ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html

IR

1. Information Retrieval; 2. Infrared

JAVA

Java is a simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture-neutral, portable, high-performance, multithreaded, dynamic, buzzword- compliant, general-purpose programming language. See java.sun.com

LIRA

Learning Information Retrieval Agent

NII

National Information Infrastructue. This may or may not be the Internet, depending on who you ask. See nii.nist.gov.

NTIA

National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Responsible for the Information Superhighway. See www.ntia.doc.gov.

OO

Object Oriented. Objects are opaque datastructures that contain their own state and methods for manipulating that state.

ORB

Object Request Broker (another CORBA word). The ORB intercepts requests for a remote object and dispatches it across the net, and returns the eventual result. ORBs hide the network from CORBA objects.

OMG

Object Management Group http://www.omg.org/

Python

An interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language that is simple and powerful. It has modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing. http://www.python.org/

RFC

Request for Comment. The Internet's way of declaring a standard. Read RFC1000 for a history of the RFCs and the Internet. See the RFC index for more RFCs. RFCs are published through the IETF by working groups.

SCAM

Stanford Copy Analysis Mechanism

SDI

Selective Dissemination of Information

SGML

Standard Generalized Markup Language.

SIDL

Stanford Integrated Digital Library. This project. http://www- diglib.stanford.edu

SIFT

Stanford Information Filtering Tool

SOAPs

Seal of Approval - a quantifier of some sort.

TCL/TK

Tool Command Language and its graphical ToolKit] Pronounced tickle tee-kay.

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. 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.

For more acronyms see The Acronym Expander.