The Interop Glossary
An evolving vocabulary for the law of interoperability governing electronic data format and communication protocol technical specifications, standards, and technical regulations.
- mapping
- In conversions between data formats or communications protocols, the process of relating each source encoding to a target encoding and identifying the translation that satisfies the relationship. In an over-simplified example, a mapping might specify that all occurrences of <foo> will be translated to <bar> where <foo> and <bar> identify the same functionality in two different markup languages. It can be difficult or impossible to satisfactorily map between two formats/protocols to the extent they do not share the same or very similar functionality, a condition known as incompatibility.
- markup
- In the context of XML markup languages, text consists of intermingled character data and markup. Markup consists of syntactically delimited characters added to the character data of a document to represent and define its structure and presentation. XML markup takes the form of start-tags, end-tags, empty-element tags, entity references, character references, comments, CDATA section delimiters, document type declarations, processing instructions, XML declarations, text declarations, and any white space that is at the top level of the document entity (that is, outside the document element and not inside any other markup). All text that is not markup constitutes the character data of the document. See W3C XML 1.0 § 2.4. The original markup language was a handwritten code used in the typographical trade that evolved over a period of some 500 years.
- metadata
- Literally, data about data. For example, a library card index is data about data, the books in the library's collection. In the context of data formats, metadatamarkup. Metadata can identify data types, classify data, define data and document structures, specify how an application should process and present data, and specify other data about data.
- multi-tripping
- An essential aspect of interoperability when multiple ICT systems must function as routers of information in a work flow or business process, passing data through a succession of applications without loss of data. In business processes and workflows, all particular applications that must process data in a processing chain often are unknown at the time the data is created. As data recycling becomes more common, the ability of ICT systems to participate in multi-tripping without data loss is becoming mission critical. Compare with round-tripping.
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