Glossary
In this section, you will find a few definitions related to the Internet, which may prove useful. Do not hesitate to use them for your presentations.
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Community: A group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household. The word can also refer to the national community or global community.
Cookie: A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information, which may be encrypted for information privacy and data security purposes.
Extranet: Private network that uses Internet protocols for network connectivity. An extranet can be viewed as part of a company's intranet that is extended to users outside the company, usually via the Internet. It has also been described as a "state of mind" in which the Internet is perceived as a way to do business with a selected set of other companies (business-to-business, B2B), in isolation from all other Internet users
Content management: A set of processes and technologies that support the collection, management, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.
Groupware: Software systems such as email, calendaring, text chat, wiki, and bookmarking belong to this category. It has been suggested that Metcalfe's law—the more people who use something, the more valuable it becomes—applies to these types of software.
HTML: stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes, and other items.
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an Application Layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is a request-response standard typical of client-server computing. In HTTP, web browsers or spiders typically act as clients, while an application running on the computer hosting the web site acts as a server.
Hypermedia: Used as a logical extension of the term hypertext in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information.
Hypertext: Text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence.
Metadata: Loosely defined as data about data.
Search Engine: Designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files.
Browser: Software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content.
Navigation/surfing: The action of moving from site to site, or from page to page, using hypertext.
Netiquette: A set of social conventions that facilitate interaction over networks, ranging from Usenet and mailing lists to blogs and forums. These rules were described in IETF RFC 1855
Tab: In the area of graphical user interfaces (GUI), a tabbed document interface (TDI) is one that allows multiple documents to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents.
Online/offline: The terms "online" and "offline" (also stylized as "on-line" and "off-line") have specific meanings in regards to computer technology and telecommunications. In general, "online" indicates a state of connectivity, while "offline" indicates a disconnected state. In common usage, "online" often refers to the Internet or the World Wide Web.
Home page: The home page (or, less commonly, homepage) is the URL or local file that automatically loads when a web browser starts or when the browser's "home" button is pressed. One can turn this feature off and on, as well as specify a URL for the page to be loaded.
PDF: Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. Adobe PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.
Popup: A form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. It works when certain web sites open a new web browser window to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript, but can be generated by other means as well.
Portal: Presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.
Portlet: Pluggable user interface software components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page. Typically, following the desktop metaphor, a portal page is displayed as a collection of non-overlapping portlet windows, where each portlet window displays a portlet.
Profiling: A form of dynamic program analysis (as opposed to static code analysis), is the investigation of a program's behavior using information gathered as the program executes. The usual purpose of this analysis is to determine which sections of a program to optimize to increase its overall speed, decrease its memory requirement or sometimes both.
Roll-over: A word utilized when “rolling over” some object with a mouse and the object reacts to the presence of the cursor on it.
Website: A collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL), often consisting of only the domain name, or the IP address, and the root path.
Download: To download means to receive data to a local system from a remote system, or to initiate such a data transfer. Examples of a remote system from which a download might be performed include a webserver, FTP server, email server, or other similar systems.
E-service: Represents one prominent application of utilizing the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in different areas. It is an interactive, content-centered and Internet-based customer service, driven by the customer and integrated with related organizational customer support processes and technologies with the goal of strengthening the customer-service provider relationship.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL): is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents and verbal discussions it is often incorrectly used as a synonym for URI.
Web: www: A system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks.
Widget: Is an element of a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or a text box. The defining characteristic of a widget is to provide a single interaction point for the direct manipulation of a given kind of data.
Workflow: A sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.
