Glossary

The following terms attempt to standardise the syntax of concepts that the TDWG Infrastructure Project routinely address.

ABCD

Access to Biological Collections Data

Applicability Statement

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BioCASE

Biological Collection Access Service for Europe. From the website: The BioCASE? project establishes a web-based information service providing researchers with unified access to biological collections in Europe while leaving control of the information with the collection holders.

Bootstrap

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Charter

A document generated from an Application for the formation of a new Task Group that outlines group membership, milestones, outputs and outcomes.

Compliance Testing

Testing to determine whether a system meets some specified standard.

Consensus

A general agreement among the members of a given group or community

Copyright

the legal right of creative artists or publishers to control the use and reproduction of their original works

Cover Sheet

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Darwin Core

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DiGIR

Distributed Generic Information Retrieval Protocol.

Discussion Group

a subgroup that has been formed to discuss an issue of common interest.

Documentation

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Documentation Track

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Domain

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Evaluation Panel

a subgroup that evaluates proposals for new TDWG initiatives.

GGF

The Global Grid Forum

HTML

Hypertext Mark-up Language, a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser

Intellectual Property

original creative work manifested in a tangible form that can be legally protected, for example by a patent, trademark, or copyright

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force

Localisation

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ISO

International Organization of Standards

OASIS

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Organization

A company, university, department or institution

PDF

Portable Document Format, developed by Adobe Systems.

Process Document

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Subgroups

All groups under the TDWG

Task Group

A subgroup that has been generated to address a specific outcome in a specific timeframe.

Team or development Team

use subgroup etc.

TDWG Process

The steps involved in the development of a TDWG standard or protocol

TDWG Environment

The TDWG site and the software tools that support TDWG subgroups in progressing TDWG goals.

Schema

A model

Standard

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Protocol

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TAG

Technical Advisory Group. A subgroup with the aim to harmonise all TDWG developments under a consistent framework.

TIP

TDWG Infrastructure Project. The Gordon and Betty Moore funded project to improve the TDWG infrastructure.

Version

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W3C?

The Worldwide Web Consortium

XDF

The Extensible Data Format (XDF) is an XML standard (consisting of a DTD and inheriting XML) developed by NASA, meant to be used throughout the scientific disciplines. In many ways it is akin to XSIL, Extensible Scientific Interchange Language. NASA provides two XDF APIs, in Perl and in Java

XML

The Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is a W3C?-recommended general-purpose mark-up language for creating special-purpose mark-up languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, RDF, RSS, MathML, XHTML, SVG, and cXML) are defined in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their form.

-- RicardoPereira - 31 Oct 2005