Glossary of Web Services Terms

CC/PP

Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profile: an RDF-based framework for the management of device profile information.
See http://www.w3.org/Mobile/CCPP/

DC(MI)

Dublin Core (Metadata Initiative): from http://www.dublincore.org/:

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.

DOM

Document Object Model: a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents. The document can be further processed and the results of that processing can be incorporated back into the presented page. Basis of Dynamic HTML.
See http://www.w3.org/DOM/

DTD

Document Type Definition: The purpose of a Document Type Definition is to define the legal building blocks of an XML document. It defines the document structure with a list of legal elements. A DTD can be declared inline in your XML document, or as an external reference.
See: http://www.w3schools.com/dtd/

HTML

Hyper Text Markup Language: the publishing language of the World Wide Web (current version: 4.01; but see also XHTML).
See http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/

HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol: Probably the most important TCP/IP based protocol. The backbone of the web.
See: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/

ICE

Information and Content Exchange: an XML-based content syndication protocol: once two parties have established a subscriber relationship, ICE allows them to automate the flow of syndicated information and requests. ICE is format-agnostic: while ICE itself is expressed in XML, ICE may be used for managing content in any format. ICE is complementary to specific content formats like NITF or packaging and metadata formats like NewsML and PRISM.
Note: More heavyweight as compared to OAI-MHP.
See: http://www.xmlnews.org/ICE/

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force: a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. See http://www.ietf.org/

KIF

Knowledge Interchange Format: a language designed for use in the interchange of knowledge among disparate computer systems (created by different programmers, at different times, in different languages, and so forth). Proposed as American National Standard.
See http://logic.stanford.edu/kif/dpans.html (for the proposed draft) and
http://www.w3.org/2000/07/hs78/KIF.html for an RDF Schema.

MHP

Metadata Harvesting Protocol: supplies an application-independent interoperability framework that can be used by a variety of communities who are engaged in publishing content on the Web. The OAI MHP results in an interoperability framework with two classes of participants:

Data Providers

administer systems that support the OAI protocol as a means of exposing metadata about the content in their systems;

Service Providers

issue OAI protocol requests to the systems of data providers and use the returned metadata as a basis for building value-added services.

Note: more flexible and more lightweight as compared to the Z39.50; see
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html

NITF

News Industry Text Format: a format for textual news stories; it complements NewsML, which describes packaging and metadata. NITF borrows large parts of its structure from HTML, but adds additional element types for marking up news-specific content. Several major news providers, including the New York Times and the Associated Press, either use or intend to use NITF for their news feeds. See http://www.xmlnews.org/NITF/

OAI

Open Archives Initiative: develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication.
See http://www.openarchives.org/

OASIS

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards: a non-profit, international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications based on public standards such as XML and SGML, as well as others that are related to structured information processing.
See http://www.oasis-open.org/

PNG

Portable Network Graphics: an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel for transparency. A W3C recommendation. See
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/

PRISM

Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata: a packaging and metadata format, similar to NewsML, RSS, and XMLNews-Meta. Like RSS 1.0 and XMLNews-Meta (but not NewsML), PRISM is based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description Framework (RDF). PRISM is developed by an industry consortium of publishing software developers and publishers, including (among many others) Adobe, Quark, Conde Nast, and Time Inc.

While the PRISM web site reports an interoperability demonstration at Seybold Boston in February 2000, no PRISM software is currently known to be available.
See http://www.xmlnews.org/PRISM/

RDF

Resource Description Framework: from http://www.w3.org/RDF/:

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.

RFC

Request For Comment: a series of notes, started in 1969, about the Internet; they discuss many aspects of computer communication, focusing on networking protocols, procedures, programs, and concepts but also including meeting notes, opinion, and sometimes humor.

The specification documents of the Internet protocol suite, as defined by the IETF are published as RFCs. Thus, the RFC publication process plays in important role in the Internet standards process;
see http://www.rfc-editor.org/

RMI

Remote Method Invocation: relies on JAVA; allows a program to invoke methods on an object when the object is not located on the same machine as the program; at the hard of distributed computing in the JAVA world; backbone of EJB

RPC

Remote Procedure Call: lets you use standalone methods across a network; can be encoded using XML resulting in XML-RPC

RSS

RDF Site Summary: a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF Specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization. see http://www.oreillynet.com/rss/

Semantic Web:

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." - Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila in http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html

See also http://www.SemanticWeb.org/ and http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

SGML

Standard Generalized Markup Language: an international standard for the definition of device-independent, system-independent methods of representing texts in electronic form. (ISO 8879; but refer also to XML.)
See http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SGML/

SHOE

Simple HTML Ontology Extension: a small extension to HTML which allows web page authors to annotate their web documents with machine-readable knowledge. SHOE claims to make real intelligent agent software on the web possible.
See http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/

SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol: e-mail is based on this. Published as RFC 821. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html

SOAP

Simple Object Access Protocol: a lightweight protocol running over HTTP and SMTP; components: Envelope, Encoding rules, Invocation part;
see http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP

SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics: a language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/

UDDI

Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration: kind of a registry; provides a means of discovering other services and registering your service for others to discover; see http://www.uddi.org/

URI

Uniform Resource Indicator or Identifier; more general than an URL; not tied to the web (ISBN numbers are URIs for books for instance) but see
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-uri-clarification-20010921/

URL

Uniform Resource Locator: loosly speaking, anything that you can type into a browsers location field to get at something

URN

Uniform Resource Name: persistent identifiers for information resources; defined in RFC 1737;
see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/urn-charter.html

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium: develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. See: http://www.w3.org/

W3C recommendation

The de facto standards for the web. The W3C is a consensus driven global group that does not have the power to formaly define or impose standards. Rather they recommend own or other developments for general usage that way typically defining de facto standards.

Web Services

the buzz word when it comes to B2B (business-to-business) communication; hard to define precisely but generally about interoperability or web applications talking to each other; There are at least two fundamentally different appoaches: (i) traditional like doing RSS based on XML, XSL, XSLT; (ii) advanced : based on developing standards like SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL; see http://www.webservices.org

WSDL

Web Services Description Language: offers a way to provide information about a discovered service (via UDDI) to allow a client to interact with it; see http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl

WSFL

Web Services Flow Language: an XML language for the description of Web Services compositions.
See http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-ref7/

XHTML

Extensible HyperText Markup Language: a reformulation of HTML 4 as an XML 1.0 application, and three DTDs corresponding to the ones defined by HTML 4. The semantics of the elements and their attributes are defined in the W3C Recommendation for HTML 4.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/html/

XML

eXtensible Markup Language: universal format for structured documents and data on the Web; see http://www.w3.org/XML/

XML Namespace

a means of associating one or more elements in an XML document with a particular URI. This effectively means that the element is identified by both its name and its namespace URI.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/

XMLNews

Specification: XMLNews consists of two parts: XMLNews-Story, a subset of an early version of NITF, and XMLNews-Meta, a simple metadata format based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description Framework (RDF). Several news amalgamators and providers, including Wavo and iSyndicate, use the XMLNews specifications. See http://www.xmlnews.org/

XML-RPC

XML encoded Remote Procedure Call; see http://www.xmlrpc.com

XML Schema

an XML based alternative to DTD. An XML schema describes the structure of an XML document. Meant to replace DTD in the future and a W3C recommendation.
See http://www.w3schools.com/schema/

XSL/XSLT

eXtensible Stylesheet Language; can be used to transform XML into HTML; from http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/:

XSL is a language for expressing stylesheets. It consists of three parts: XSL Transformations (XSLT): a language for transforming XML documents, the XML Path Language (XPath), an expression language used by XSLT to access or refer to parts of an XML document. (XPath is also used by the XML Linking specification). The third part is XSL Formatting Objects: an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics. An XSL stylesheet specifies the presentation of a class of XML documents by describing how an instance of the class is transformed into an XML document that uses the formatting vocabulary.

Z39.50

"Z39.50" refers to the International Standard, ISO 23950: Ïnformation Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification", and to ANSI/NISO Z39.50. The Library of Congress is the Maintenance Agency and Registration Authority for both standards, which are technically identical (though with minor editorial differences).
http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/

Some Further Links

Background information about the Open Archives Initiative, its Metadata Harvesting Protocol, what it does provide (and what it does not)
http://www.arl.org/newsltr/217/mhp.html

A registry for Metadata can be found at:
http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/

A great place to look for tutorials on web-related things:
http://www.w3schools.com/

For first hands-on experience with web services check out IBMs web services tool kit (free download; can be used with any operating system that supports Java 1.3 or above) http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/webservicestoolkit