The Interop Glossary
An evolving vocabulary for the law of interoperability governing electronic data format and communication protocol technical specifications, standards, and technical regulations.
- AGP
- Agreement on Government Procurement. A treaty governing procurement by all levels of government in signatory nations, which include the U.S.A. The AGP is intended to remove unnecessary obstacles to international trade in government procurement practices and procedures in part by requiring use of international standards adopted pursuant to the ATBT as government procurement specifications at all levels of government in member nations except to the extent international standards were prepared, adopted, or applied with a view to or with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles to international trade. See text of the AGP (annotated version).
- ANSI
- American National Standards Institute, a major voluntary standards and conformance assessment procedure development organization in the U.S. ANSI is organized as an industry consortium. Through a memorandum of understanding that is of questionable legality, NIST has delegated responsibilities for representing the U.S. government's interests in international standard development efforts to ANSI and its chosen delegees, whereas the ATBT and at least arguably the U.S. Administrative Procedures Act rests those responsibilities with the federal government itself. On ANSI generally, see About ANSI.
- application-level interoperability
- Interoperability among ICT systems established through means other than by adherence to a data format or communications protocol specification, for example where knowledge about another ICT system's interface for a given interchange of information is not fully and publicly specified and such information must be obtained through collaboration among developers or through non-collaborative techniques such as litigation, legislation, or reverse engineering. Another variant of application-level interoperability requires the use of an application's programming interfaces in lieu of writing directly to a file format or communications protocol. JTC 1 Directives, Annex I, prohibits standards and technical regulations from enabling only application-level interoperability by requiring that international standards in the ICT sector "clearly and unambiguously specify the conformity requirements essential to achieve the interoperability." The Agreement on Government Procurement has the effect of extending that requirement to technical (procurement) specifications.
- ASCII
- American Standard Code for Information Interchange, often referred to as plain text. ASCII is a character encoding based on characters of the English language plus various non-printing device control codes. There are many variants. ASCII has been extended to accommodate a large number of human languages and for other purposes using, e.g., Unicode and ISO/IEC:10646-Universal Character Set. ASCII is the foundation of many markup languages, including all variants of XML. See generally An annotated history of some character codes or ASCII. ASCII was orginally developed as a telegraphy code, i.e., a communications protocol, but quickly became a "file format" as electromagnetic data storage media displaced punched paper tape.
- ATBT
- Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. A treaty intended to remove unnecessary obstacles to international trade in the preparation, adoption, and application of technical standards, technical regulations, and conformity assessment procedures. Like the AGP, the ATBT applies at all levels of government in signatory nations, as well as to all non-governmental standards development organizations in member nations. See text of the ATBT (annotated version).
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