The Interop Glossary
An evolving vocabulary for the law of interoperability governing electronic data format and communication protocol technical specifications, standards, and technical regulations.
- A three-letter extension to a software file name indicating to the system that the file type is one of the Portable Document Formats originally developed by Adobe. PDF is widely used for pre-print and archival purposes, as well as for portable documents. PDF/A ("Archival") is now ISO 19005-1:2005 and PDF/X is standardized as ISO 15929 and 15930. See generally White Paper PDF Primer by PDF Tools AG. PDF is expected to be succeeded by XML-based formats, with Adobe Mars and Microsoft XPS as leading contenders.
- processing chain
- Common to workflows and other workgroup-related document exchange, a processing chain is the routing of electronic documents between multiple information processing systems. Multiple applications are involved, with the possibility of document content changing frequently through extraction of information from one or more documents to automatically create another. Applications in a processing chain must respect the processing instructions, scripts, macros, the embedded linking of objects, and security settings needed by other applications in the chain.
- profile
- In electronic document standards work, a profile consists of a defined superset or subset of a specification with fully specified conformance requirements essential to achieve interoperability among implementing applications. Complex technical specifications often have many optional features, making interoperability problematic because of differences as to which options are supported. Although profiles are widely used in other types of data formats, their utility was generally neglected in standards for the office productivity software sector before the W3C's CDRF was introduced. E.g., neither ODF nor OOXML have been profiled for interoperability purposes.
p
