The Interop Glossary

An evolving vocabulary for the law of interoperability governing electronic data format and communication protocol technical specifications, standards, and technical regulations.

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n
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement. A regional treaty among Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.A. that implements a number of the Free Trade Agreements, including the AGP and ATBT. See NAFTA text; NAFTA Secretariat web site; NAFTA Glossary.
namespace
XML namespaces provide a simple method for qualifying element and attribute names used in XML documents by associating them with namespaces identified by Uniform Resource Identifier ("URI"). In XML compound documents, namespaces indicate the particular markup language in use for a specified portion of the document. XML namespaces are generally specified according to the W3C Namespaces in XML 1.0 Recommendation. For a short overview, see Wikipedia article.
NB
An acronym commonly used to refer to national standardization bodies that act on behalf of national governments in the preparation, adoption, and maintenance of technical regulations, international standards, and conformity assessment procedures developed pursuant to the requirements of the ATBT. In most nations that are ATBT members, NBs are units of government. However, some nations such as the U.S. have delegated such responsibilities to private industry consortia.See also: standard
NIST
National Institute of Standards and Technology. A U.S. federal agency with broad jurisdiction over standards activities. See NIST General Information web page.
normative
A normative document is any document that provides rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results and covers such documents as standards, technical specifications, codes of practice, and technical regulations. A normative reference is another document incorporated by reference in a normative document in such a way as to make it indispensable for the implementation of the specification in the normative document. A normative requirement is a requirement that is indispensable for the implementation of a normative document, as opposed to optional or recommendatory requirements. Competent normative documents incorporate definitions of requirements keyword terms that may differ. E.g., compare definition of may in RFC 2119 with that in ISO/IEC Directive Part 1, Annex H. (The former imposes a nuanced requirement of interoperability while the latter does not.)