STING software engineering glossary

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4GL: Fourth generation language.
88open: A consortium with the aim of creating a multivendor open computing environment based on the Motorola 88000 RISC processor family - More information.
AAP DTD: A DTD for a standard SGML document type for scientific documents, defined by the AAP - More information.
AAP: The Association of American Publishers: engaged in standardisation efforts in document preparation.
ABI: Application Binary Interface: the interface by which an application program gains access to operating system and other services, designed to permit porting of compiled binary applications between systems with the same ABI.
Abstract Class: In object-oriented programming, a class designed only as a parent from which sub-classes may be derived, but which is not itself suitable for instantiation. Often used to "abstract out" incomplete sets of features which may then be shared by a group of sibling sub-classes which add different variations of the missing pieces.
ACA: Application Control Architecture: DEC's implementation of ORB
ACE: Advanced Computing Environment: a consortium to agree on an open architecture based on the MIPS R4000 chip. A computer architecture ARCS will be defined, on which either OS/2 or Open Desktop can be run - More information.
ACE: Adaptive Communication Environment, a C++ Wrapper Library for communications from the University of California at Irvine - More information.
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery - More information.
Acrobat: A platform-independent text and image formatter/viewer from Adobe Systems - More information.
Actis: An approach to integrated CASE by Apollo.
Active object: An object that encompasses its own thread of control.
Active DBMS: A conventional or passive DBMS combined with a means of event detection and condition monitoring. Event handling is often rule-based, as with an expert system.
ActiveX: A software development kit from Microsoft for develpment of Internet applications and content - More information.
Actor: In object-oriented programming, an object which exists as a concurrent process.
Actor: A term in Chorus denoting the unit of resource allocation.
Actra: A multiprocessor Smalltalk project.
AD/Cycle: (AD = Application Development): a set of SAA-compatible IBM-sponsored products for program development, running on workstations accessing a central repository on a mainframe. The stages cover requirements, analysis and design,production of the application, building and testing, and maintenance. Technologies used include code generators and knowledge based systems, as well as languages and debuggers.
Ada: A high-level computer language sponsored by the US Department of Defense. It has a multitasking mechanism, and a number of features useful for software engineering - More information.
AdaIC: Ada Information Clearinghouse - More information.
Adaline: Name given by Widrow to ADAptive LInear NEurons, that is neurons (seeMcCulloch-Pitts) which learn using the Widrow-Huff Delta Rule (see also Madaline).
ADAMO: A data management system written at CERN based on the Entity-Relationship model - More information.
Adaptable User Interface: A toolkit from Oracle allowing applications to be written portably for different windowing systems. It provides one call level interface along with a resource manager and editor across a range of "standard" GUIs, including Macintosh, Windows and the X Window System.
Adaptive learning: Learning in which a system programs itself by adjusting weights or strengths until it produces the desired output. Same as Hebbian.
ADDD: A Depository of Development Documents. A public domain Software Engineering Environment from GMD developed as part of the STONE project - More information.
ADL: Assertion (or API) Definition Language. A project for Automatic Interface Test Generation - More information.
ADT: Abstract Data Type: a class of data structures described by means of a set of operations rather than by physical representation, such as a class in object-oriented programming..
Aegis: A CASE tool for project change management, part of the GNU software.
AENOR: Asociacion Espanola de Normalizacion y Certificacion. The Spanish standards organisation.
AEP: Application environment profile .
AES: Application environment specification: a set of specifications from OSF for programming and user interfaces, aimed at providing a consistent application environment on different hardware platforms. It includes O/S for the operating system (user commands and program interfaces), U/E for the User Environment (Motif), and N/S for Network services.
AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies.
AFNOR: Association Francaise pour la Normalisation: the French national standards institute, a member of ISO.
AFS: Andrew File System .
AGOCG: Advisory Group on Computer Graphics. Advising UK Higher Education on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Multimedia - More information.
AGL: Atelier de Genie Logiciel: French for IPSE.
AI: Artificial Intelligence .
AIA: Application Integration Architecture: DEC's "open standards" specifications.
AICA: Associazione Italiana di Calcolo Automatico.
AIFF: Audio IFF. A format developed by Apple for storing high-quality sampled sound and musical instrument info; also used by SGI and several professional audio packages.
AIS: Advanced Informatics Support project for administrative work at CERN - More information.
AIX: Advanced Interactive eXecutive: IBM's version of UNIX, taken as the basis for the OSF standard - More information.
Algol: A high-level programming language developed in the 1950s .
Algorithm: A systematic procedure guaranteed to produce a result after a finite number of steps.
Alvey: A funding programme for collaborative research in the UK.
ami: Applications of Metrics in Industry (Assess, Analyze, Metricate, Improve). A method for software project management and process improvement - More information.
Amoeba: A distributed operating system developed by A.Tanenbaum and others at Amsterdam - More information.
AMS: Andrew Message System.
AMADEUS: A PC client for Hyper-G.
Analysis: The part of the software development process concerned with defining the requirements for the product.
ANDF: Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format: an emerging OSF standard for software distribution. Programs are compiled into ANDF before distribution, and executables are produced from it for the local target system.
Andrew File System: The distributed file system of the Andrew project, adopted by the OSF as part of their DCE.
Andrew Message System: A multimedia interface to electronic mail and bulletin boards, developed as part of the Andrew project
Andrew Project: A distributed system project for support of educational and research computing at Carnegie Mellon University - More information.
Andrew Toolkit: A portable user interface toolkit developed as part of the Andrew project, running on the X Window System and distributed with X11R5.
ANL: Argonne National Laboratory, USA - More information.
Anna: A specification language from Stanford University for formally specifying Ada programs. It has a Specification Analyzer and a Consistency Checking System.
Annealing: A technique which can be applied to any minimization or learning process based on successive update steps (either random or deterministic) where the update step length is proportional to an arbitrarily set parameter which can play the role of a temperature. Then, in analogy with the annealing of metals, the temperature is made high in the early stages of the process for faster minimization or learning, then is reduced for greater stability.
ANSA: Advanced Network Systems Architecture: an architecture for distributed computer systems based on a model developed as an Esprit project - More information.
ANSI Z39.50: See Z39.50.
ANSI/SPARC Architecture: A layered model of database architecture comprising a physical schema, a conceptual schema, and user views.
ANSI: American National Standards Institute, responsible for approving U.S. standards in many areas, including computers and communications. ANSI is a member of ISO - More information.
AnswerGarden: A help desk software package from MIT.
AOCE: Apple Open Collaboration Environment. A set of software for e-mail, directory services etc.
APA: Application Portability Architecture: DEC's plan for portable applications software.
apE: A graphics package from the Ohio Supercomputer Centre .
Apertos: An object-oriented operating system from Sony Computer Science Laboratory - More information.
API: Application Program Interface: a term for the interface by which an application program gains access to operating system and other services, defined at source-code level.
APL: A Programming Language developed by Iverson for mathematical applications.
Apollo: Apollo Computer, now a division of Hewlett-Packard, also the name of a range of workstations manufactured by this company.
AppKit: A set of objects used by the application builder for the NeXTstep environment.
Applet: A small application, often downloaded from a remote server and run in a controlled environment. Typically written in a language such as Java for execution by a WWW browser.
Apple: Apple Computer Inc, manufacturers of the Macintosh range of Personal Computers.
Appletalk: The proprietary local area network protocol developed by Apple for their Macintosh range of processors. Current implementations exist on Localtalk and Ethertalk.
APSE: Ada Programming Support Environment.
ARC: (Previously ARCS) Advanced RISC Computing Specification: the standard hardware architecture of ACE., specifying the baseline hardware requirements to create ACE-compatible systems.
Arcadia: A software engineering research project by a consortium of US universities - More information.
Archie: An archive server database and query system operated by the McGill University School of Computer Science. Services remote requests for information on software kept on archives worldwide and available via ftp - More information.
ARCS: see ARC.
Arjuna: A system for reliable distributed computing from the Computing Laboratory, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. It supports atomic transactions on persistent objects.
ARL: ASSET Reuse Library.
ARL: Association of Research Libraries (North America) - More information.
ARPANET: U.S. Department of Defense (DARPA) wide area network. It became operational in 1968 and was the forerunner of the Internet.
Artifex: A CASE environment from ARTIS of Turin for the development of large event-driven distributed systems. It has code-generation and rapid prototyping features - More information.
Artificial Intelligence: The subfield of computer science concerned with the concepts and methods of symbolic inference by computer, and the symbolic representation of the knowledge to be used in making inferences - More information.
ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
ASDL: Abstract-Type and Scheme-Definition Language: developed as part of Esprit project GRASPIN, as a basis for generating language-based editors and environments. It combines an object-oriented type system, syntax-directed translation schemes and a target-language interface.
ASE: Advanced Software Environment: an object-oriented application support system from Nixdorf.
ASIC: Application-Specific Integrated Circuit: an integrated circuit designed to perform a particular function by defining the interconnection of a set of basic circuit building blocks drawn from a library provided by the circuit manufacturer.
ASIS: Ada Semantic Interface Specification. An interface between an Ada library and any tool requiring information in it - More information.
ASIS: Application Software Installation Server at CERN - More information.
ASME: American Society of Mechanical Engineers: involved in CAD standardisation.
ASN.1: Abstract Syntax Notation 1: an ISO/CCITT standard for the description of data. It is intended to facilitate the exchange of data between application programs.
ASPECT: An IPSE developed by an Alvey project, using Z to specify the object-management system and tool interface.
ASQ: Automated Software Quality. The use of software tools, such as automated testing tools, to improve software quality.
ASQC: American Society for Quality Control.
ASSET: Asset Source for Software Engineering Technology. A programme to promote software reuse by the DoD - More information.
AtFS: Attributed File System: the basis of the Shape_VC toolkit. Cooperative work within projects is supported by a status model controlling visibility of version objects, locking, and "long transactions" for synchronizing concurrent updates. The concept of object attributes provides a basis for storing management information with versions and passing this information between individual tools. This mechanism is useful for building integrated environments from a set of unrelated tools.
Athena: Project Athena: a distributed system project for support of educational and research computing at MIT. Much of the software developed is now in wider use, especially the X Window System - More information.
Atherton: Atherton Technology developed the Software BackPlane CASE framework. Their Atherton Tool Integration Services were the basis for the ATIS standard.
ATIS: A Tools Integration Standard: an object-oriented interface to a set of services that allows the saving, accessing, and managing of information in a common repository. Developed by Atherton Technology and DEC, based on an extended version of the Software BackPlane, now proposed as an industry standard.
ATK: The Andrew Toolkit
ATM: Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A transmission system for telecommunications - More information.
ATM: Adobe Type Manager.
AUE: Andrew User Environment. Part of the Andrew project
AUI: Adaptable User Interface from Oracle.
AUIS: Andrew user Interface System - More information.
AutoCAD: A CAD software package for mechanical engineering marketed by Autodesk Inc.
AVL: Abstract Visualization Language in the Tecate project.
AVS: Application Visualisation System: a portable modular UNIX-based graphics package supported by a consortium of vendors including Convex, DEC, IBM, HP, SET Technologies, Stardent and WaveTracer - More information.
AWK: A pattern scanning and processing language named after its authors: Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan.
aXe: A text editor for the X-Window-System.
B: A Formal method of program design - More information.
Bachman: Proposed a style of Entity-Relationship modeling which differs from the original Chen proposals.
Back-propagation: An important algorithm for learning in feed-forward networks which makes use of a mathematical trick when the network is simulated on a digital computer, yielding in just two traversals of the network (once forward, and once back) both the difference between the desired and actual output, and the derivatives of this difference with respect to the connection weights.
Backus Naur: A formal language for syntax specification.
Bamboo: A trusted third-party authentication system from the University of Iowa, similar to Kerberos - More information.
Baseline: See Released version.
BASIC: Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code: a programming language, usually interpreted, suitable for simple applications.
BBN: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.,of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was awarded the original contract to build the ARPANET and has been extensively involved in Internet development. It is responsible for managing NNSC, CSNET, and NEARnet.
BCS: Binary Compatibility Standard: the ABI of 88open.
BCS: British Computer Society.
BEA: Basic programming Environment for interactive-graphical Applications, from Siemens-Nixdorf.
Bedrock: A C++ class library for Macintosh user interface portability.
Benchmark: A standard set of programs which can be run on different platforms to compare performance - More information.
Bento: A multi-vendor initiative allowing files to contain typed parts, to allow standard access between parts of a compound document independent of the file system.
Berkeley UNIX: see BSD.
BETA: An object-oriented language and associated programming environment from Mjolner Informatics, Aarhus - More information.
BHT: Budget Holder's Toolkit (at CERN) - More information.
BITNET: An academic and research network connecting approximately 2500 computers, often IBM mainframes. It provides interactive electronic mail, and file transfer services via a store-and-forward technique based on IBM NJE protocols. BITNET and Internet traffic are exchanged via several gateway hosts. It is now operated by CREN.
BMP: Bitmap format (for Windows) - More information.
BNF: Backus-Naur Form.
BOCS: Berard Object and Class Specifier, an Object-oriented CASE tool from Berard Software Engineering.
Boehm B.: Proposed the COCOMO technique for evaluating the cost of a software project.
BoM: Bill of Materials.
BON: Better Object Notation. Used in the Esprit Business Classes project - More information.
Bookreader: DEC's CD-ROM-based online documentation browser.
Bookviewer: A hypertext documentation system from Oracle based on Oracle Toolkit. It allows the user to create private links and bookmarks, and to make multimedia annotations.
BOOM: Berard Object-Oriented Methodology - More information.
BOS: A data management system written at DESY and used in some HEP programs.
Bourne shell: A common UNIX shell - More information.
BPM: Business Process Modelling.
BPR: Business Process Reengineering.
Browser: A tool for navigating around hypertext documents.
BSD: Berkeley Source Distribution: the versions of UNIX developed and distributed by the University of California at Berkeley. Many commercial UNIX implementations such as SunOS and Dynix are derived from it.
BSI: British Standards Institution: a member of ISO.
BSP method: A CASE method from IBM .
Byte: A data unit of several bits smaller than a computer word: usually 8 bits.
C++: An extension to the C language developed primarily by B.Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Laboratories: it supports object-oriented programming among other enhancements - More information.
C Beautifier: A tool for tidying the syntax of C source code.
c shell: A common UNIX shell originating on Berkeley UNIX - More information.
C: A language developed in conjunction with the UNIX operating system at AT&T Bell Laboratories by D.Ritchie and now an ANSI standard. It has grown popular due to its simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility. C programs are often easily adapted to new environments - More information.
Cache: A small fast memory holding recently-accessed data, designed to speed up further access.
CACI: A company marketing SIMSCRIPT, MODSIM, and other simulation software products.
CACM: Communications of the ACM.
CAD/CAM: Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing (see CAD)
CAD: Computer Aided Design: usually applied to that part of CAE which has to do with the drawing or physical layout steps of engineering design.
CADD: Computer Aided Detector Design: a project to develop standards and methods to allow cooperation between HEP detector designers working in different institutes - More information.
CADRE: A software engineering vendor in the US.
CAE: Common Applications Environment of X/Open, based on POSIX and C.
CAE: Computer Aided Engineering: a technique for using computers to help with all phases of engineering design work. As CAD, but also involving the conceptual and analytical design steps.
CAI: Computer Aided Instruction.
CAIS-A: Common APSE Interface Set: DoD-STD-1838A.
CAIS: Common APSE Interface Specification.
CAiSE: Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering.
CAJUN: CD-ROM Acrobat Journals Using Networks. A project at Nottigham University More information.
CALS: Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistics Support: a DoD standard for electronic exchange of data with commercial suppliers - More information.
Caml: A functional programming language in the style of ML - More information.
CApH: Conventions for the Application of HyTime. An activity of the GCA
CAQ: Computer Aided Quality.
CARDS: Central Archive for Reusable Defense Software of the DoD .
CASE*Method: An analysis and design method from Oracle, targeted at information management applications.
CASE framework: A set of products and conventions that allow CASE tools to be integrated into a coherent environment.
CASE tools: Software tools to help in the application of CASE methods to a software project.
CASE: Computer Aided Software Engineering: a technique for using computers to help with the systematic analysis, design, implementation and maintenance of software. Adopting the CASE approach to building and maintaining systems involves software tools and training for the developers who will use them.
CAST: Computer Aided Software Testing.
CATE: Computer Aided Test Engineering: CASE methods applied to electronics testing and linked to CAE
CAUSE: An international (mainly North American) nonprofit association for managing and using information technology in higher education - More information.
cb: C Beautifier.
CBT: Computer-Based Training.
CCI: Common Client Interface for Mosaic
CCITT: A committee of the ITU responsible for making technical recommendations about telephone and data communication systems for PTTs and suppliers. Plenary sessions are held every four years to adopt new standards.
CCL: Common Command Language. A standard for bibliographic information retrieval systems.
CCS: Common Communication Services: the standard program interface to networks in SAA.
CDA: Compound Document Architecture: DEC's set of standards for compound document creation, storage, retrieval, interchange and manipulation.
CDC: Control Data Corporation
CDD/Plus: DEC's CASE repository.
CDE: C Development environment from IDE
CDE: Common Desktop Environment. A Desktop manager from COSE - More information.
CDF: Common Data Format. A library and toolkit for multi-dimensional data sets - More information.
CDM: Content Data Model. An SGML-based DoD specification for interactive manuals.
CDIF: CASE Data Interchange Format: an emerging standard.for interchange of data between CASE tools - More information.
CE: Concurrent Engineering.
CEBAF: Continuous Electron Beam Facility in Newport News, VA USA - More information.
Cecil: An object-oriented language from Washington University intended to support rapid construction of high-quality, extensible software - More information.
CEN: Conseil Europeen pour la Normalisation: a body coordinating standardisation activities in the EEC and EFTA. countries.
CERA: Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications. An international journal - More information.
CERC: Concurrent Engineering Research Center, West Virginia University - More information.
CERN: The European Laboratory for Particle Physics.
CERNLIB: The CERN Program Library - More information.
CERT: Computer Emergency Response Team. Now CERT Coordination Center, works with the Internet community on security problems - More information.
CENELEC: CEN-electricite.
CFI: CAD Framework Initiative. A consortium working on interface standards for integrating CAD tools and data.
CFOOT: Corporate Facilitators of Object-Oriented Technology.
CGI: Common Gateway Interface. A standard for running external programs under a WWW or similar information server - More information.
CGI: A (French) software engineering vendor in the US.
CGM: Computer Graphics Metafile: a standard file format for storage and communication of graphical information, widely used on personal computers and accepted by desktop publishing systems. (ANSI/ISO 8632-1987) - More information.
Change Management: A consistent set of techniques that aid in evolution, composition and policy management of the design and implementation of an object or system.
Charm: A portable object-oriented parallel programming system from University of Illinois - More information.
Chen: Peter Chen developed the Entity-Relationship model.
CHEOPS: A satellite-based batch data dissemination project between CERN and member state institutes.
Child version: A version of a version. See change management.
CHILL: CCITT High-Level Language. A real-time language used in telecommunications.
Choices: An object-oriented operating system from University of Illinois - More information.
Chorus: A distributed operating system developed at INRIA.
CIAC: Computer Incident Advisory Capability of the US DoE - More information.
CIC: Committee on Institutional Cooperation. An academic consortium of American Universities - More information.
CICERO: Control Information system Concepts based on Encapsulated Real-time Objects. A CERN DRDC proposal.
CIDR: Classless Inter-Domain Routing (on the Internet)
CIL: Component Integration Laboratories. An effort to create a common framework for interoperability between applications on desktop platforms, formed by Apple, IBM, Novell, Oracle, Taligent, WordPerfect, and Xerox - More information.
CIM: Computer Integrated Manufacturing.
CIS: Case Integration Services: a committee formed to discuss CASE tool integration standards related to ATIS.
CISC: Complex Instruction Set Computer.
CISI: A French software house.
CIX: Commercial Internet eXchange. A non-profit trade association of Public Data Internetwork service providers - More information.
CL: See Common Lisp.
Class-Relation Method: A design technique based on the concepts of object-oriented programming and the Entity-Relationship model from the French company Softeam.
Class: A language developed by the Andrew Project: one of the first attempts to add object-oriented features to C.
Class: The prototype for an object in an object-oriented language; analogous to a derived type in a procedural language.
Class library: A library of reusable classes for use with an object-oriented programming system - More information.
Cleanroom: A software development approach aimed at producing software with the minimum number of errors - More information.
Client: A system or process that requests a service from another system or process.
CLHEP: A C++ class library for high energy physics applications - More information.
CLOS: Common Lisp Object System: an object-oriented language derived from Common Lisp - More information.
CLP: Constraint Logic Programming.
CLU: An object-oriented programming language developed at MIT by Liskov et al.
CLX: The Common Lisp interface to the X Window System, equivalent to Xlib.
CM: Configuration Management.
CMA: Concert Multithread Architecture from DEC .
CML: Chemical Markup Language. A means for interchanging chemical information, based on SGML - More information.
CMM: Capability Maturity Model for software development organisations, from SEI - More information.
CMS: A code management system from DEC.
CMVC: Configuration Management Version Control from IBM.
CMZ: A portable interactive code management system from CodeME S.A.R.L in use in the high-energy physics community.
CNET: Centre national d'Etudes des Telecommunications: the French national telecommunications research centre at Lannion.
CNI: Coalition for Networked Information. Promotes the creation of and access to information resources in networked environments in order to enrich scholarship and enhance intellectual productivity - More information.
CNRI: Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Reston, VA. A US research and development organisation in information processing technology - More information.
COBOL: COmmon Business Oriented Language: an early and widely-used programming language for business applications.
COCOMO: Constructive Cost Model: a method for evaluating the cost of a software package proposed by B.Boehm, "Software Engineering Economics" Prentice-Hall 1987 - More information.
CODA: An object-oriented data-acquisition system at CEBAF - More information.
Codd's First Normal Form: see Normal Form.
Code Management: A source code management system helps program developers keep track of version history, releases, parallel versions etc. There are several in popular use - More information.
CodeCenter: A proprietary software development environment for C programs, offering an integrated toolkit for developing, testing, debugging and maintainance (formerly Saber-C)
Cognitech: A French software house specialising in Artificial Intelligence.
COHESION: DEC's CASE environment.
Collage: A synchronous collaborative data analysis tool for use over the Internet, from NCSA - More information.
COM: Common Object Model. An open architecture from DEC and Microsoft, allowing interoperation between ObjectBroker and OLE - More information.
COMIS: a COMpilation and Interpretation System. A FORTRAN interpreter use by the PAW system - More information.
COMMA: Common Object-oriented Methodology Metamodel Architecture from OPEN - More information.
Common Lisp: An ANSI standard version of Lisp.
COMNET: A simulation tool from CACI for analysing wide-area voice or data networks, based on SIMSCRIPT..
Compaq: A US manufacturer of IBM PC-compatibles.
Compression: Data files are often compressed to take up less network bandwidth, memory etc. Common examples are program executables and visual images. Many algorithms and utilities exist for this - More information.
COMSOFT: Consortium for the Management of Emerging Software Technologies - More information.
Concrete Class: In object-oriented programming, a class suitable to be instantiated.(as opposed to an abstract class).
Concurrent Clean: A functional language for the Macintosh from the University of Nijmegen.
Concurrent Engineering: An approach where all aspects of a product's life-cycle are considered as early as possible in the design, manufacturing and maintenance process - More information.
Configuration management: The process of identifying, defining, recording and reporting the configuration items in a system and the change requests. Controlling the releases and change of the items throughout the life-cycle See also code management - More information.
Constructor: A function provided by a class in C++ to instantiate an object.
Container class: A class whose instances are collections of other objects. Examples include stacks, queues, lists and arrays.
CooL: Combined object-oriented Language from the ITHACA Esprit project, which combines C-based languages with database technology.
COOL: A class library for C++ from Texas Instruments - More information.
COOTS: Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems.
CORBA: Common Object Request Broker Architecture: an OMG specification - More information.
CORDIS: The European Community R&D information service - More information.
CORE: Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment. A project to publish American Chemical Society journals electronically.
Cortex: An experimental slow controls project at CERN - More information.
COS: Corporation for Open Systems: an international consortium of computer users and vendors, set up to provide ways of testing OSI implementations.
COSE: Common Open Software Environment. An initiative by Hewlett-Packard, Sun, IBM, Novell, Univel and SCO to move towards consistency and interopability between Unix suppliers.
COSS: Common Object Services Specification in CORBA.
COSINE: Cooperation for Open Systems Interconnection Networking in Europe. A EUREKA project.
CoST: A set of software tools for SGML documents.
COTS: Commercial Off The Shelf solution - More information.
CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - More information.
CPI: Common Program Interface: the API of SAA.
CPSR: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. A US non-profit organisation concerned with the effects of computers on society - More information.
CPU: Central Processing Unit, usually applied to that part of a computer which carries out the arithmetic and controls the instruction flow.
CRAY: Cray Research Inc.: manufacturers of a range of large powerful mainframes.
CRC: Class-Responsibility-Collaboration. A technique described in Object-Oriented Software by Wirfs-Brock.
CREASE: Catalog of Resources for Education in Ada and Software Engineering. A database maintained by AdaIC.
CREN: Corporation for Research and Educational Networking: responsible for providing networking service to BITNET and CSNET users - More information.
cron: The clock daemon in UNIX that executes commands at specified dates and times according to instructions in a file - More information.
Cross software: Software developed on one kind of computer for use on another (usually because the other computer does not have itself adequate facilities for software development).
CRS4: Centro di Ricerca, Sviluppo e Studi Superiori in Sardegna. ( Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia). A high performance computing centre with an interesting information server.
CSCW: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (also known as Groupware): software tools and technology to support groups of people working together on a project, often at different sites - More information.
csh: See c shell
cshell: See c shell
CSL: Caml Special Light. An implementation of Caml - More information.
CSMA/CD: Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection: a network arbitration scheme used on Ethernet. A station with a message to send starts sending if there is no carrier detected on the transmission medium. If a collision occurs, transmission is abandoned and retried after a delay.
CSNET: Computers and Science Network, operated by CREN for US computer science institutes. It provides electronic mail service via dial-up lines, plus X.25 and Internet services.
CSP: Communicating Sequential Processes. A programming model developed by T. Hoare at Oxford University - More information.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. A simple mechanism for adding style to WWW documents - More information.
CSTC: Computer Security Technology Center of the US DoE - More information.
CTAN: Comprehensive TeX Archive Network - More information.
CTI: Computer Telephony Integration.
CUA: Common User Access: the User Interface standard of SAA.
curses: A set of subroutines in UNIX for handling navigation on a terminal screen using the cursor - More information.
CVS: A code management system based on RCS - More information.
CWI: Dutch Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam - More information.
CWIS: Campus-Wide Information System. Many universities and other institutes have computerised information systems, often based on WWW or gopher
DAA: Distributed Application Architecture: under design by Hewlett-Packard and Sun. A distributed object management environment that will allow applications to be developed independent of operating system, network or windowing system.
DACNOS: A prototype network operating system for multivendor environments, from IBM European Networking Centre Heidelberg and University of Karlsruhe.
DAD: Distributed Adamo Database. An extension to ADAMO - More information.
daemon: A process running in the background performing some service (such as handling print queues) in UNIX or other operating systems.
DANTE: A company established by the national research networks in Europe to provide international network services - More information.
DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Project Agency of the US Department of Defense,.responsible for the development of new technology, including ARPANET.
DASE: Distributed Application Support Environment .
Data base: See DBMS
Data Definition Language: A language enabling the structure and instances of a database to be defined in a human- and machine-readable form.
Data dictionary: A set of data descriptions that can be shared by several applications.
Data Flow Diagram: A graphical notation used to describe how data flows between processes in a system. An important tool of most structured analysis techniques.
Data Model: A set of data structures with manipulation and validation operators for general purpose usage. Examples are the Entity-Relationship model and NIAM
Data Warehouse: A database of information intended for use as part of a decision support system. The data is typically extracted from an organisation's operational databases.
Database: See DBMS.
Datacom: A DBMS from Computer Associates International..
DATATRIEVE: A query and report system for use with DEC's VMS system (RMS, VAX Rdb/VMS or VAX DBMS).
DataViews: Graphical user interface development software from V.I.Corporation, aimed at constructing platform-independent interactive views of dynamic data.
DAZIX: Daisy/Cadnetix Corporation: a supplier of digital electronic CAE systems.
DB2: A DBMS from IBM.
DB: Database.
DBA: DataBase Administrator.
dBASE III: A DBMS from Ashton-Tate Corporation.
DBMS: Database management system: such systems typically manage large structured sets of persistent data, offering ad hoc query facilities to many users. They are widely used in business applications: commercial examples include Ingres, Oracle, Sybase etc.
DCA: Document Content Architecture.from IBM
DCE: Distributed Computing Environment from OSF - More information.
DCF: Document Composition Facility.
DCOM: Distributed Component Object Model Protocol - More information.
DCSA: Distributed Component Software Architecture - More information.
DD: Data Dictionary.
DDE Manager: An Oracle product that lets Windows applications that support the DDE protocol act as front end tools for Oracle. It allows applications like Excel, Word, Ami Professional, WingZ, and ToolBook to query, update, graph, and report information stored in Oracle.
DDE protocol: Dynamic Data Exchange: a Microsoft protocol that allows Windows applications to communicate using a client/server model.
DDIF: Digital Document Interchange Format. A CDA specification for representing compound documents in revisable format; a DEC standard for document encoding.
DDL: Data definition language.
DDL: Document Description Language.
DDTS: Distributed Defect Tracking System.
DEC: Digital Equipment Corporation: a computer manufacturer and software vendor.
DECdesign: A software analysis and design tool from DEC supporting several methodologies.
DECdns: Distributed Naming Service: adopted by OSF as the naming service for DCE.
DECnet: The network marketed by DEC to connect its computers together.
DECstation: A range of RISC based workstations manufactured by DEC.
DECwindows: DEC's windowing environment based on the X Window System.
DECwrite: DEC's CDA-based, WYSIWYG document processing application. It can generate and import SGML marked-up documents.
Delphi: An object-oriented development system from Borland - More information.
Delta: The information which differentiates a version from members of its immediate family. See change management
Delta-4: Definition and Design of an open Dependable Distributed system architecture. An Esprit project investigating the achievement of dependability in open distributed systems, including real-time systems.
DELTASE: A distributed processing environment concerned with fault-tolerant and process-control applications from the Esprit Delta-4 project.
DEM: Digital Elevation Model. A format for map files - More information.
DeMarco: Tom DeMarco proposed a form of Structured Analysis.
Demeter: A CASE tool developed mainly by Karl Lieberherr (see Aug/Sep 1988 issue of JOOP, OOPSLA '89 Proceedings "Contributions to Teaching Object-Oriented Design and Programming")
DES: Data Encryption Standard. A NIST encryption standard.
Design: Design is usually considered to be the phase of software development following analysis, and concerned with how the problem is to be solved.
Design recovery: A subset of reverse engineering in which domain knowledge, external information, and deduction of fuzzy reasoning are added to the observations of the subject system to identify meaningful higher level abstraction beyond those obtained directly by examining the system itself.
Desktop manager: A user interface to system services, usually icon and menu based like the Macintosh Finder, enabling the user to run applications and use a filing system without directly using the command language of the operating system.
DESQview: A system from Quarterdeck Office Systems implementing multitasking under MS-DOS.
Destructor: A function provided by a class in C++ to delete an object.
DESY: Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron Laboratory, Hamburg, Germany - More information.
Development: The process of analysis, design, coding and testing software.
DFD: Data Flow Diagram.
DGL: Data Generation Language: a tool for generating test data for hardware or software systems.
DGL: The distributed version of GL .
Dhrystone: A benchmark program in C and Ada.
DIALOG: A commercial bibliographic database and retrieval service from DIALOG Information Services.
DIB: Device Independent Bitmap, a format for portable images.
Dienst: A protocol for a distributed digital document library built on http - More information.
DII: Dynamic Invocation Interface. An OMG specification.
DIIG: Digital Information Infrastructure Guide. A resource to facilitate the development of the NII - More information.
DIN: Deutsche Institut fuer Normung: the German standardisation body, a member of ISO.
DIP: Document Image Processing: storage, management and retrieval of images.
Dirt: Design In Real Time: a user interface builder for the X Window System by R.Hesketh
DISA: Data Interchange Standards Association (USA)
DISA: Defense Information Systems Agency (USA) - More information.
Display PostScript: An extended form of PostScript permitting its interactive use with bitmap displays.
DL/I: The data manipulation language of IMS.
DLG: Digital Line Graph. A format for map files - More information.
DLM: Distributed Lock Manager on distributed VMS systems.
DME: Distributed Management Environment: an OSF standard presently at the RFT stage.
DMS: Document Management System.
DNS: Distributed Name Service: see DECdns.
DOC: Distributed Object Computing.
Document Examiner: A high-performance hypertext system by Symbolics that provides on-line access to their user documentation.
Document Style Semantics and Specification Language: An ISO standard under preparation, addressing the semantics of high-quality composition in a manner independent of particular formatting systems or processes. DSSSL is intended as a complementary standard to SGML for the specification of semantics.
DoD-STD-2167A: A DoD standard specifying the overall process of development and documentation for mission-critical software - More information.
DoD-STD-2168: A DoD standard for software quality assurance procedures.
DoD: The US Department of Defense, responsible for sponsoring many standards in the software engineering field - More information.
DoE: The US Department of Energy - More information.
DOE: Distributed Object Environment: a distributed object-oriented application framework from SunSoft.
Domain: Distributed Operating Multi Access Interactive Network:the proprietary network protocol used by Apollo workstations.
DOMF: Distributed Object Management Facility: an OMG-compliant object management system; part of DOE. from SunSoft.
DOORS: Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System - More information.
DORIS: 3-10 GeV center of mass electron-positron storage ring/collider at DESY.
DPS: Display PostScript.
DQO: Data Quality Objectives - More information.
DRAGON: An Esprit project aimed at providing effective support to reuse in real-time distributed Ada applications..
DRAGOON: A distributed concurrent object-oriented Ada-based language from the Esprit DRAGON project.
DSE: Data Structure Editor.
DSDM: Dynamic Systems Development Method. A non-proprietary Rapid Application Development method - More information.
DSEE: Domain Software Engineering Environment: a proprietary CASE framework and configuration management system from Apollo.
DSOM: Distributed SOM
DSP: Digital Signal Processing.
DS: Dansk Standard. The Danish standards association.
DSS: Decision Support Systems. Software tools to help with management tasks.
DSSSL: Document Style Semantics and Specification Language. An ISO standard under preparation, addressing the semantics of high-quality composition in a manner independent of particular formatting systems or processes. DSSSL is intended as a complementary standard to SGML for the specification of semantics - More information.
DTD: Document Type Definition: the definition of a document type in SGML, consisting of a set of markup tags and their interpretation.
DTI: UK Department of Trade and Industry.
DTIC: Defense Technical Information Center of the US Dept. of Defense.
DTL: DVI Text Language. An ASCII DVI format.
DTLS: Descriptive Top-Level Specification language: used in POSIX and TRUSIX.
DTP: Desktop publishing.
DTS: Distributed Time Service .
DVI: Device independent file format. A dvi file containing a description of the formatted document is the usual output of TeX .
Dylan: An object-oriented dynamic language - More information.
DWARF: A debugging information format for UNIX System V
E: A database progamming language developed for the EXODUS project.
E-mail: See Electronic mail .
EAPLS: European Association for Programming Languages and Systems - More information.
EARN: European Academic and Research Network. A self-managing network in the research community originally sponsored by IBM. It uses BITNET protocols and connects to BITNET in the US - More information.
EAST: A Eureka project developing a software engineering platform.
EC: Electronic Commerce. Managing business transactions using networking and electronic means.
ECFA: European Committee for Future Accelerators. This body, whose principal role is to take care of Europe's requirements for future particle accelerators, has also looked at particle physics data handling on a European-wide basis.
ECHO: A public database service of the European Community - More information.
ECHT: European Conference on Hypertext.
ECIP2: An Esprit Project on the definition of a specification language at the requirement level.
ECIS: European Committee for Interoperable Systems.
ECM: Enterprise Component Modelling.
ECMA: European Computer Manufacturers Association - More information.
ECO: Engineering Change Order.
ECOOP: European Conference on Object-oriented Programming.
ECRC: Electronic Commerce Resource Centers. A network of US government sponsored centers that provide support to government and industry in developing and implementing strategies for business process improvement, implementing enabling technologies, and migrating to electronic commerce - More information.
EDA: Product line from Dazix.
Eden: An object-oriented distributed operating system based on an RPC mechanism .
EDH: Electronic Document Handling (at CERN) - More information.
EDI: Electronic Data Interchange: a set of standards for exchanging orders and other business transactions by electronic mail - More information.
EDIF: Electronic Design Interchange Format .
EDM: Engineering Data Management.
EDMS: Electronic Document Management System.
EDUCOM: A nonprofit consortium of US higher education institutions promoting access to and use of information resources and technology - More information.
EEMA: European Electronic Messaging Association.
EER: An extended entity-relationship model .
EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation. An organisation working on civil rights issues in networking - More information.
EHTS: Emacs HyperText System: an experimental multiuser hypertext system from the University of Aalborg. It consists of a text editor (based on Epoch and GNU Emacs and written in elisp) and a graphical browser (based on XView and written in C) running under the X Window System and OpenWindows Both tools use HyperBase as database.
EIA: Electronic Industries Association.
Eiffel: An object-oriented programming language developed by B.Meyer et al. and commercialised by ISE - More information.
Eiffel shelf: A set of user-contributed classes available with the Eiffel system.
EIS: Executive Information System.
EJO: Electronic Journals Online. A service of the OCLC.
ELOT: The Greek standards association.
Electronic Mail: A system allowing computer users to exchange messages via a network.
Ellemtel: A C++ style guide originated by Ellemtel Telecom Systems, Stockholm.
ELSA: Electronic Library Services and Applications. A library of reusable public domain software supported by NASA - More information.
emacs: A popular editor and associated utilities for UNIX from the FSF
email: See Electronic mail .
EMDIR: The CERN Electronic Mail DIRectory utility.
Encapsulation: The ability to provide users with a well-defined interface to a set of functions in a way which hides their internal workings. In object-oriented programming, the technique of keeping together data structures and the methods (procedures) which act on them.
Entity-Relationship diagram: A type of diagram used in the Entity-Relationship model.
Entity-Relationship: An approach to data modelling proposed by P.Chen in 1976.
EOQ: European Organization for Quality.
EOUG: European ORACLE Users Group.
EPCS: Experimental Physics Control Systems: a group of the European Physical Society, focussing on all aspects of controls, especially informatics, in experimental physics, including accelerators and experiments.
EPIC: Electronic Privacy Information Center. A US center working on privacy issues relating to the National Information Infrastructure - More information.
EPICS: Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System. Software for accelerator, experiment, and process control from ANL and LANL - More information.
EPO: European Patent Office - More information.
Epoch: A version of GNU Emacs for the X Window system from NCSA.
EPS: Encapsulated PostScript - More information.
EQA: European Quality Award for process improvement.
ER: Entity-Relationship.
ERA: Entity-Relationship-Attribute.
ERC: An extended entity-relationship model .
ERCIM: European Research Consortium on Informatics and Mathematics. An association of European research organizations promoting cooperative research on key issues in information technology - More information.
ERCS: Extended Reference Concrete Syntaxes for SGML, to support East Asian and other non-English languages - More information.
ERD: Entity-relationship diagram.
ESA: European Space Agency - More information on ESA software standards.
ESF: Eureka Software Factory.
ESI: European Software Institute. A network of organisations co-operating in strategic planning of process improvement - More information.
ESIS: Element Structure Information Set produced by SGML parsers.
ESML: Extended Systems Modelling Language: a real-time software engineering methodology based on RTSA.
ESPIF: European Software Process Improvement Foundation - More information.
Esprit: A funding programme to develop Informatics in the EEC. - More information.
Estelle: A formal description technique developed for OSI protocol specification.
ESUG: European Smalltalk Users' Group.
Ethernet: A 10-megabit/second local area network developed by Xerox and now widely adopted. Hosts are connected to a coaxial cable, and transmission conflicts are avoided by backing off and re-sending later. IEEE standard 802.3 defines the hardware and transport layers of the network.
ETLA: Extended Three Letter Acronym.
ETM: An active DBMS from the University of Karlsruhe.
ETSI: European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
EUnet: The European UNIX network: an Internet service provider. More information.
Eureka: A European technological development programme.
EuropaNET: A combination of pan-European backbone services run by DANTE.
EUSIDIC: European Association of Information Services - More information.
EUUG: European UNIX User Group.
EWOS: European Workshop for Open Systems.
Excelerator: A set of CASE tools from Index Technology Corp.
eXodus: A package from White Pines allowing the Macintosh to be used as an X server.
EXODUS: An extensible database project developed at the University of Wisconsin.
Expert system: An intelligent computer program that contains a knowledge base, specialized software, and a set of algorithms or rules that infer new facts from knowledge and from incoming data.
Express: A data modelling language adopted by the ISO working group on STEP.
Extensible database: A DBMS that allows access to data from remote sources as if it were part of the database.
EXUG: European X User Group - More information.
FATMEN: A distributed file and tape management system for HEP data - More information.
FDDI: Fiber Distributed Data Interface: a new ANSI standard for a 100 megabits/second fibre optic token ring local area network
FEA: Finite Element Analysis.
Feature: An attribute or function of a class in Eiffel.
Feed-forward: A multilayer perceptron network in which the outputs from all neurons (see McCulloch-Pitts) go to following but not preceding layers, so there are no feedback loops.
FFT: Fast Fourier Transform
FIMS: Form Interface Management System.
FIPS: Federal Information Processing Standard: U.S. Government standards.
FITS: Flexible Image Transport System. The standard data interchange and archive format of the astronomy community - More information.
FNAL: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Illinois, USA).
Floppy: A Fortran coding convention checker. The latest version has a feature for generating HTML. - More information.
FOOM: Formal Object Oriented Method.
FOOT: Forum for Object Oriented Technology at CERN - More information.
Foresight: A software product from Nu Thena providing graphical modelling tools for high level system design and simulation.
Formal methods: Several formal approaches to program specification have been developed, such as those based on VDM or Z. They can be used to develop software with high reliability, for safety-critical or high-volume applications - More information.
FORML: Formal Object Role Modeling Language.
FORTH: Greek FOundation for Research and Technology - More information.
FORTRAN: FORmula TRANslating system: a programming language widely used for many years in scientific applications.
Forward delta: The delta which, when combined with a version, creates a child version. See change management
Forward engineering: The traditional process of moving from high-level abstractions and logical, implementation-independent designs to the physical implementation of a system.
FORWISS: Bayerische Forschungszentrum fuer Wissensbasierte Systeme (Bavarian research centre for knowledge-based systems) in Passau - More information (in German).
FOSI: Formatted Output Specification Instance template for SGML
FPA: Function Point Analysis.
FPM: Function Point Metric.
Fourth generation language: A high-level language, usually non-procedural, to allow users inexperienced in programming to develop database applications.
Framework: In object-oriented systems, a set of classes that embodies an abstract design for solutions to a number of related problems - More information.
FrameMaker: Commercial publishing software available on a wide variety of workstations and addressing technical and scientific needs - More information.
FreeHEP: An organisation offering a repository of software and related information for high energy physics applications - More information.
Fresco: An object-oriented API for graphical user interfaces, under development by the X consortium as an open, multi-vendor standard.
Friend: Relationship between classes in the language C++.
FSF: Free Software Foundation (675 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA): dedicated to promoting the development and use of free software, especially the GNU system.
FSM: Finite State Machine.
FTAM: File Transfer, Access, and Management: an application layer protocol for file transfer and remote manipulation (ISO 8571).
FTP: File Transfer Protocol (based on TCP/IP). Also the name of a utility program available on several operating systems which makes use of this protocol to access and transfer files on remote computers.
FTR: Formal Technical Review. A software engineering technique - More information.
Full-custom: A technique used for the design of integrated circuits that involves the manipulation of circuit designs at the semiconductor device level.
Function point: A unit for estimating the functionality of a program - More information.
Functional language: A general purpose, high-level programming language based on the mathematical notion of functions. A functional program consists of a set of (possibly recursive) function definitions. Its execution consists of the evaluation of a function . Programs written in a functional language are generally compact and elegant, but tend to run slowly and consume a lot of memory.
Functional programming: See Functional language
FUSE: A DEC software development environment for ULTRIX, offering an integrated toolkit for developing, testing, debugging and maintainance.
Fusion: An object oriented analysis and design method developed by Hewlett Packard - More information.
Futurebus+: A high performance bus system specified by IEEE Std.896.2
Fuzzy logic: An alternative to traditional logic where truth values range between 0.0 and 1.0, with 0.0 representing absolute Falseness and 1.0 representing absolute Truth - More information.
FVWM: A window manager for the X Window System derived from twm - More information.
FWEB: See Literate Programming
FWF: Free Widget Foundation - More information.
G2: A real-time expert system from Gensym Corporation.
GAIA: GUI Application Interoperability Architecture project of OSF
GAMS: Guide to Available Mathematical Software at NIST - More information.
GANDALF: A software development environment from Carnegie Mellon University.
Garbage collection: The process of reclaiming storage which is no longer in use.
Garnet: A user interface development environment for Common Lisp and X or Macintosh from Carnegie Mellon - More information.
GBIP: General Purpose Interface Bus (IEEE 488).
GCA: Graphic Communications Association.
GCC: Gnu C Compiler.
GDB: Gnu DeBugger.
GDMO: Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects. A standard (ISO/IEC 10165-4 / ITU-T Rec. X.722) for defining data models on ASN.1
GEANT: A simulation, tracking and drawing package for HEP - More information.
GEI: A German software engineering company.
GEN-X: An expert system developed by General Electric.
Generic Markup: In computerised document preparation, a method of adding information to the text indicating the logical components of a document, such as paragraphs, headers or footnotes: SGML is an example of such a system. Specific instructions for layout of the text on the page do not appear in the markup.
Genericity: The possibility for a language to provided parameterized modules or types. e.g. List(of:Integer) or List(of:People).
Genesia: An expert system developed by Electricite de France and commercialised by STERIA (Paris).
GEOS: An object-oriented operating system project - More information.
ghostscript: The gnu PostScript interpreter.
ghostview: An X window interface to the ghostscript interpreter.
GIF: Graphics Interchange Format: a standard for digitised images compressed with the LZW algorithm - More information.
GILS: Government Information Locator Service. A plan for a decentralised collection of information locators and associated public services to find information throughout the US government.
GINA: Generic INteractive Application. A toolkit of useful classes and functions for authoring GUIs built on CLM, CLX and CLOS, from GMD
GKS-3D: The three-dimensional version of GKS, a standard for graphics I/O (ISO 8805).
GKS: Graphical Kernel System: a standard for graphics I/O (ANSI X3.124) - More information.
GL: A graphics package from Silicon Graphics.
GLUT: OpenGL Utility Toolkit - More information.
GMD: Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (German Institute for Mathematics and Data Processing), D-53754 Sankt Augustin - More information.
GNAT: The GNU NYU Ada 95 compiler - More information.
GNU: GNU 's Not UNIX: a popular range of portable software from FSF, upwardly compatible with UNIX - More information.
GOOD: An object-oriented framework for graphical applications from TU Ilmenau running under X Windows with special support to IRIS GL, OpenGL, VOGL, etc. - More information.
Gopher: A Campus Wide Information System designed at the University of Minnesota - More information.
GPIB: General Purpose Interface Bus: an 8-bit parallel bus (IEEE 488).
GPM: General Purpose Macrogenerator written by C. Strachey around 1965. The author said "It contains in itself all the undesirable features of every possible machine code... It can also be almost impenetrably opaque".
GQM: Goal/Question/Metrics. A software engineering assessment method by V. Basili.
Grapevine: A distributed system project .
Grammar: A grammar is a mathematical system for defining a language, as well as a device for giving the sentences in the language a useful structure.
GRAS: A public domain graph-oriented database system for software engineering applications from RWTH Aachen
GRASPIN: An Esprit project to develop a personal software engineering environment to support the construction and verification of distributed and non-sequential software systems.
Grasshopper: An experimental operating system for persistent systems - More information.
GRIB: GRid In Binary. World Meteorological Organization data format - More information.
Groupware: see CSCW.
GROW: GNU Remote Operations Web. An architecture for building networked applications and services using WWW - More information.
GUI: Graphical User Interface.
Guide: A hypertext system from the University of Kent (GB) and OWL for displaying online documentation .
GUIDE: Graphical User Interface Development Environment from Sun.
GUILE: An interpreter for the GROW project.
gunzip: The decompression utility corresponding to gzip .
gzip: A compression utility available with the gnu software.
h: A simple markup language intended for quick conversion of existing text to hypertext - More information.
Hardware description language: A language used for the conceptual design of integrated circuits. Examples are VHDL and Verilog.
Harmony: A real-time operating system developed by the SEL in Canada.
Harvest: An information discovery and access system for the Internet from the University of Colorado - More information.
Haskell: A functional language (Hudak et al.).
HBOOK: A histogramming package in the CERN program library - More information.
hc: The compiler for the h hyperbook language.
HCI: Human Computer Interface (or Interaction) - More information.
HCS: Heterogeneous Computer System: a distributed system project .
HDF: Hierarchical Data Format from NCSA - More information.
HDL: Hardware description language.
HDTV: High Definition Television.
Hebbian: Refers to the most common way for a neural network to learn, namely supervised learning. Using a training sample which should produce known responses, the connection weights are adjusted so as to minimize the differences between the desired and actual outputs for the training sample.
Helix: A hardware description language from Silvar-Lisco.
HEP: High Energy (Particle) Physics.
HEPDB: A database management system for HEP - More information.
HEPiX: A recently formed collaboration among various HEP institutes aiming at providing "compatible" versions of the UNIX operating system at their sites - More information.
HEPnet: An association concerned with networking requirements for high energy physicists - More information.
HEPVM: A collaboration among various HEP institutes to implement "compatible" versions of IBM's VM-CMS operating system at their sites.
HERA: An electron-proton collider at DESY, W. Germany.
Hermes: An experimental object-oriented distributed systems language from IBM Watson Research Centre.
Hesiod: The name server of the Athena project.
Heuristic: A rule of thumb, simplification or educated guess that reduces or limits the search for solutions in domains that are difficult and poorly understood. Unlike algorithms, heuristics do not guarantee solutions.
Hewlett-Packard*: A manufacturer of workstations, electronic instrumentation and test equipment etc.
HIGZ: High Level Interface to Graphics and Zebra. Part of the PAW system - More information.
HiPAC: An active DBMS from Xerox Advanced Information Technology.
HIPPI: HIgh Performance Parallel Interface: a 100 Mbyte/sec data transfer system with associated interfaces and switches, developed at Los Alamos National Lab and now ANSI standard X3T9/88-127.
HISTORIAN: A source code management system sold by OPCODE, Inc..
History: For more information on the history of computing, see the The Virtual Museum of Computing
HOL: An interactive theorem proving system based on Higher Order Logic - More information.
Home Page: The starting point for a WWW session. Many system adminstrators set up "home pages" which are the default page shown when a user begins a session. These pages usually have a lot of options and menu items that apply to that particular institution and then have links to other places. Here is the CERN home page.
HOOD: Hierarchical Object Oriented Design: a method for Architectural Design primarily for software to be developed in Ada, leading to automated checking, documentation and source code generation.
Hope: A functional language (Burstall et al. 1980).
Hopfield: John Hopfield in the early 1980's investigated a particular kind of neural network which is now commonly referred to as the Hopfield network or Hopfield model. In the Hopfield network, there are no special input or output neurons (see McCulloch-Pitts), but all are both input and output, and all are connected to all others in both directions (with equal weights in the two directions). Input is applied simultaneously to all neurons which then output to each other and the process continues until a stable state is reached, which represents the network output.
HotJava: A WWW browser from Sun based on the Java language - More information.
HP-UX: The version of UNIX running on Hewlett-Packard workstations.
HP VEE: Visual Engineering Environment from Hewlett-Packard: a package similar in intention to LabVIEW running on UNIX workstations with OSF/Motif.
HP: Hewlett-Packard.
HPLOT: A graphical output facility for HBOOK - More information.
HPPI: An earlier name for HIPPI.
HTML: HyperText Markup Language. An SGML document type used to mark up hypertext in the WWW project - More information.
HTTP: HyperText Transfer Protocol. The protocol used between client and server in the WWW project.
Hyper-G: A hypertext system from TU Graz - More information.
Hyper-Man: A browser available with Epoch giving hypertext capability for the UNIX manual.
HyperBase: An experimental active multiuser database for hypertext systems from the University of Aalborg, written in C++.It is built on the client-server model enabling distributed, concurrent, and shared access from workstations in a local area network. See EHTS.
Hyperbole: An information management and hypertext system - More information.
Hypercard: A software package for the Macintosh for storage and retrieval of information. It can handle images, and is designed for browsing. The powerful customisable interactive user interface allows new applications to be easily constructed by manipulating objects on the screen, often without conventional programming.
Hypermedia: Hypertext systems where the nodes can contain text, graphics, audio, video, as well as source code or other forms of data - More information.
HyperNeWS: A Hypertext system from the Turing Institute Glasgow, based on NeWS.
HyperODA: ODA extensions for hypermedia.
Hypertalk: The language for writing procedures associated with objects in Hypercard.
Hypertext: An approach to information management in which text is stored in a network of nodes connected by links. The nodes are meant to be viewed through an interactive browser. A link is something which connects a piece of text to a destination piece of text; the source and destination areas are usually marked on a display by highlighting or special graphics. You are reading hypertext now by courtesy of WWW - More information.
HyTime: Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language: an ANSI/ISO Standard (ISO/IEC 10744) from the SGML Users' Group's Special Interest Group on Hypertext and Multimedia (SIGhyper) - More information.
I-CASE: Integrated CASE: another term for an IPSE.
IAB: The Internet Architecture Board of the Internet Society - More information.
IAD: A dynamic analyser from IBM giving information on run time performance and code utilisation.
IAFA: Internet Anonymous FTP Archives. An IETF working group.
IANA: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - More information.
IBM: International Business Machines - More information.
IBN: The Belgian standards institute.
ICADD: International Committee for Accessible Document Design. Dedicated to making printed materials accessible to persons with print disabilities. Works on the generation of Braille, large print or electronically navigable editions of books from desktop publishing files - More information.
ICCP: Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals.
ICSI: International Computer Science Isntitute at Berkeley, CA. - More information.
IDE: Interactive Development Environments: a US Software Engineering Company.
IDEA: International Data Encryption Algorithm (used by PGP).
IDL: Interactive Data Language. A package for interactive reduction, analysis, and visualization of scientific data, from Research Systems, Inc. - More information.
IDL: Interface Definition Language: an OSF standard for defining RPC stubs.
IDL: Interface Definition Language: associated with the CORBA standard - More information.
IDSS: Intelligent Decision Support Systems.
IEC: International Electrotechnical Commission: a standardisation body at the same level as ISO - More information.
IEF: Information Engineering Facility. A CASE tool from Texas Instruments which generates code from graphical business process models.
IEEE 1076: The IEEE standard for VHDL..
IEEE 488: The IEEE standard for GPIB.
IEEE 802: The IEEE standards for local area networks (LANs). The Ethernet standard is 802.3, the IBM Token Ring is IEEE 802.5.
IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (USA) - More information.
IESG: Internet Engineering Steering Group. Part of the Internet Society responsible for technical management of IETF activities and the Internet Standards process - More information.
IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force. A group of people who make technical and other contributions to the engineering and evolution of the Internet and its technologies. It is the principal body engaged in the development of new Internet Standard specifications - More information.
IETM: Interactive Electronic Technical Manual.
IFAC: International Federation of Automatic Control, involved in informatics related to control systems.
IFDL: Independent Form Description Language: DEC's language for describing form-based human interfaces in DECforms.
IFIP: International Federation of Information Processing - More information.
IFPUG: International Function-point Users Group - More information.
IGES: Initial Graphics Exchange Specification: an ASME/ANSI standard for the exchange of CAD data.
IIDMS/R: Integrated database management system: a DBMS from Cullinet Software Inc.
IIIS: International Institute of Informatics and Systemics.
ILU: Inter-Language Unification. A system from Xerox PARC that promotes software interoperability via interfaces - More information.
Immediate version: See Child version.
IMS: Information Management System: a DBMS from IBM.
IMSE: Integrated Modelling Support Environment: an Esprit programme.
INCOSE: International Council on Systems Engineering. An international organization formed to develop, nurture and enhance the system engineering approach to multi-disciplinary system product development - More information.
Inference: The logical process by which new facts are derived from known facts.
Inference engine: A program that infers facts from a set of knowledge or inputs.
INFN: Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare: an Italian State research organisation - More information.
Informix: A relational DBMS vendor.
INGRES: A relational DBMS vendor.
Inheritance: In object-oriented programming, the ability to derive new classes from existing classes. A derived class inherits the instance variables and methods of the base class, and may add new instance variables and methods. A new method may be defined with the same names as one in the base class, in which case it overrides the original one.
INRIA: Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, French computer science research institute - More information.
Instantiation: A more precisely defined version of some object which was already partially defined. In object-oriented programming, a particular example of an object produced from its class template.
InterBase: A commercial active DBMS.
Interface Architect: An interface builder for Motif distributed by Hewlett-Packard (see UIMX).
Interleaf: A document preparation system available on the Sun, VAX, Apollo and other workstations.
INTERLINK: A commercial product comprising hardware and software for file transfer between IBM and VAX computers.
Intermedia Interchange Format: A Standard Hypertext Interchange format from IRIS.
Intermedia: A hypertext system developed by a research group at IRIS (Brown University).
Intermetrics: A software engineering company .
Internet Address: A thirty-two-bit number that uniquely identifies an Internet host. It is usually represented as four 8-bit numbers separated by dots e.g. 128.121.4.5. It consists of a network number and a host number, and can be subdivided in several ways.
Internet: A loosely-organized international collaboration of autonomous, interconnected networks, supporting host-to-host communication through voluntary adherence to open protocols and procedures defined by Internet Standards, typically based on the TCP/IP protocol suite - More information.
Interpress: A page description language from Xerox.
InterViews: An object-oriented toolkit developed at Stanford University for building graphical user interfaces. It is implemented in C++ and provides a library of objects and a set of protocols for composing them.
Intrinsics: A library package on top of Xlib, extending the basic functions of the X Window System. It provides mechanisms for building widget sets and application environments..
Inventor: See Open Inventor.
Inverse engineering: The process of extracting high-level abstract specifications from source code using program transformations - More information.
ION: Implementation-Oriented Notation. A notation designed to graphically document object-oriented programs - More information.
IP address: An Internet address.
IP: Internet transport layer Protocol.
IPC: Inter-Process Communication.
IPE: Integrated Programming Environment.
IPF: Information Presentation Facility. A document markup system for OS/2 based on SGML.
IPSE: Integrated Project Support Environment: a term for a set of management and technical tools to support software development, usually integrated in a coherent framework: equivalent to an SEE.
IPTES: Incremental Prototyping Technology for Embedded Realtime Systems, an Esprit project.
IPVR: Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems (Stuttgart).
IQA: Institute of Quality Assurance (UK).
IRC: Internet Relay Chat. A system whereby a number of people can participate in a discussion in real time on the Internet.
IRD: Internet Resource Discovery.
IRDS: Information Resource Dictionary System. A set of ISO standards for CASE repositories. It governs the definition of data dictionaries to be implemented on top of relational databases (see repository, data dictionary).
Iris: An object-oriented DBMS.
IRIS: Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship of Brown University (Providence RI).
IRIS: See IRIS Explorer
IRIS Explorer: A visualisation system - More information.
ISA: An Esprit project continuing the ANSA project.
ISA: International Smalltalk Association (now disbanded).
ISAM: Indexed Sequential Access Method: a file access method supporting both sequential and indexed access.
ISBN: International Standard Book Numbering.
ISCN: International Software Consulting Network. A network of process improvement experts.
ISDE: Integrated Software Development Environment: equivalent to an IPSE.
ISDN: Integrated Services Digital Network: a set of CCITT standards to support many types of signal traffic (speech, data, video) via a digital transmission system, eventually intended to replace current telephone systems. The Basic rate is 64 kbits/sec - More information.
ISE: Interactive Software Engineering: a software engineering company marketing Eiffel among other products.
ISEE: Integrated Software Engineering Environment: equivalent to SEE.
ISERN: International Software Engineering Research Network -