Glossary¶

ebRIM

Enterprise Business Registry Information Model..

CSW

Catalog Service for the Web. The OGC Catalog Service defines common interfaces to discover, browse, and query metadata about data, services, and other potential resources.

ISO

International Standards Organisation is an international-standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. http://www.iso.org

ISO TC211

ISO/TC 211 is a standard technical committee formed within ISO, tasked with covering the areas of digital geographic information (such as used by geographic information systems) and geomatics. It is responsible for preparation of a series of International Standards and Technical Specifications numbered in the range starting at 19101.

GeoNetwork

GeoNetwork opensource is a standards based, Free and Open Source catalog application to manage spatially referenced resources through the web. http://geonetwork-opensource.org

GPL

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. GeoNetwork opensource is released under the GPL 2 license. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Creative Commons

GeoNetwork documentation is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Find more information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages.

XSD

XML Schema, published as a W3C recommendation in May 2001, is one of several XML schema languages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSD

ebXML

Enterprise Business XML.

DAO

Data Access Object.

CRUD

Create Read Update and Delete.

DB (or DBMS)

A database management system (DBMS) is computer software that manages databases. DBMSes may use any of a variety of database models, such as the network model or relational model. In large systems, a DBMS allows users and other software to store and retrieve data in a structured way.

SOA

Service Oriented Architecture provides methods for systems development and integration where systems package functionality as interoperable services. A SOA infrastructure allows different applications to exchange data with one another.

FGDC

The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is an interagency committee that promotes the coordinated development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis in the USA. See http://www.fgdc.gov

JMS

Java Messaging Service.

TDD

Test Driven Development.

JIBX

Binding XML to Java Code.

HQL

Hibernate Query Language.

OO

Object Oriented.

EJB

Enterprise Java Beans.

SOAP

Simple Object Access Protocol is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks.

OGC

Open Geospatial Consortium. A standards organization for geospatial information systems http://www.opengeospatial.org

OSGeo

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. http://www.osgeo.org

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations is a specialised agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. http://www.fao.org

WFP

World Food Programme of the United Nations is the food aid branch of the United Nations, and the world’s largest humanitarian organization. http://www.wfp.org

UNEP

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) coordinates United Nations environmental activities, assisting developing countries in implementing environmentally sound policies and encourages sustainable development through sound environmental practices. http://www.unep.org

OCHA

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is designed to strengthen the UN’s response to complex emergencies and natural disasters. http://ochaonline.un.org/

URL

A Uniform Resource Locator specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it.

GAST

GeoNetwork Administrator Survival Tool. A desktop application that allows administrators of a GeoNetwork catalog to perform a range of admin operations.

WebDAV

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote World Wide Web servers.

OAI-PMH

Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It is a protocol developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It is used to harvest (or collect) the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives.

WMS

Web Map Service is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet that are generated by a map server using data from a GIS database. The specification was developed and first published by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999.

WFS

Web Feature Service provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the “source code” behind a map.

WCS

Web Coverage Service provides an interface allowing requests for geographical coverages across the web using platform-independent calls. The coverages are objects (or images) in a geographical area

WPS

Web Processing Service is designed to standardize the way that GIS calculations are made available to the Internet. WPS can describe any calculation (i.e. process) including all of its inputs and outputs, and trigger its execution as a Web Service.

UUID

A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is an identifier standard used in software construction, standardized by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) as part of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE).

MAC address

Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to most network adapters or network interface cards (NICs) by the manufacturer for identification, and used in the Media Access Control protocol sublayer. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address on Wikipedia

MEF

Metadata Exchange Format. An export format developed by the GeoNetwork community. More details can be found in this manual in Chapter Metadata Exchange Format.

SKOS

The Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems (SKOS) is an area of work developing specifications and standards to support the use of knowledge organisation systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes. http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

Z39.50 protocol

Z39.50 is a client-server protocol for searching and retrieving information from remote computer databases. It is covered by ANSI/NISO standard Z39.50, and ISO standard 23950. The standard’s maintenance agency is the Library of Congress.

SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

LDAP

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP.

Shibboleth

The Shibboleth System is a standards based, open source software package for web single sign-on across or within organisational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorisation decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.

DC

The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross-domain information resource description. It provides a simple and standardised set of conventions for describing things online in ways that make them easier to find.

ESA

European Space Agency is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space. http://www.esa.int

FOSS

Free and Open Source Software, also F/OSS, FOSS, or FLOSS (free/libre/open source software) is software which is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS

JDBC

The Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API is the industry standard for database-independent connectivity between the Java programming language and a wide range of databases – SQL databases and other tabular data sources, such as spreadsheets or flat files. The JDBC API provides a call-level API for SQL-based database access. JDBC technology allows you to use the Java programming language to exploit “Write Once, Run Anywhere” capabilities for applications that require access to enterprise data. With a JDBC technology-enabled driver, you can connect all corporate data even in a heterogeneous environment.