Glossary

=KIDMM Glossary= We can build a glossary here. Suggest you use Heading 3 style for the headwords. Later, we can use an A–Z array at the top of the page and anchors to create links down the page.

ACL

 * Access Control List** — A feature of some wiki systems and other CMS-based systems which allocates rights to users either on a user-by-user basis or a ‘taxonomic’ basis according to rôle, or both. For example anyone in the world may have reading rights to most pages, while editing rights are reserved for approved members logged in with their ID and password. There may be a class of super-editor or administrator who has reserved powers to create or delete pages or lock them against editing. There may also be a taxonomy of pages too; for example in an association, staff might be able to see pages which association members cannot.

Bliss Bibliographic Classification (BC)
A library classification scheme originally devised by the American librarian Henry E. Bliss (1870–1955), partly in reaction to the Dewey Decimal Classification. BC has a concept of “alternative location,” in which a particular subject can be put in more than one place. The system is more adopted in British libraries than in American ones. The [|Bliss Classification Association], founded 1967, is working on a revision – BC2 – which incorporates faceted classification methods. The Secretary of the BCA is Vanda Broughton (of UCL School of Information Studies) who is also Chair of ISKO-UK.

Blog
A blog (contraction of ‘weblog’) is a type of website, usually maintained and updated by an individual, which contains diary-like entries giving accounts of events, commentaries on current affairs or things elsewhere on the Internet, the author’s thoughts etc, often accompanied by images and other media, and with links to other sites. Entries are posted in chronological order (typically reverse-chronological); they are rarely edited afterwards; and the site may allow others to add comments. The term ‘weblog’ was coined in 1997 by John Barger, and the ‘blog’ contraction in 1999 by Peter Merholz, according to an [|article in Wikipedia]. Blogging grew out of the phenomenon of online diaries.

CamelCase
The practice of creating compound words in which capital letters are used in the middle, without spaces between; so called because of the ‘humps’ in the middle of the word-phrases. This has been used in the past to create product names which can be registered e.g. //CinemaScope//, //PageMaker//. Important in the context of wikis, because some of the earlier wiki systems such as WikiWikiWeb required page names to be CamelCased, such as //MakingNewPagesInThisWikiSystem//. In general this has been phased out: Wikipedia, for example, requires page names to match their subject properly, thus //Benjamin Franklin// not //BenjaminFranklin//. Because of this, special mark-up has had to introduced to indicate which words on a wiki page point to another page.

CAPTCHA

 * Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart** – as defined by [|captcha.net] (q.v.), a CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. Because of the prevalence of spam generating robots, some form of CAPTCHA is now essential on any website which accepts text input from unregistered users.
 * ¶ ** Most of us will be familiar with CAPTCHAs which require the user to recognise characters and letters within obfuscated images, but they can also take other forms such as asking the user to do mathematical calculations, or find the odd one out from a set of images or words. Accessibility is clearly a concern here: visually-impaired users will have problems dealing with hard-to-recognise characters jumbled up within images.
 * ¶ ** In 2007 it was reported, by the [|BBC] amongst others, that reCAPTCHA technology was being used (by von Ahn et al. at Carnegie Mellon) to assist in the digitising of old documents and manuscripts as a byproduct of the fight against spam. (c.f. [|Wikipedia])

CMS

 * Content Management System** — a server-based application to organise the development of content-oriented web sites. CMSs often provide 'workflow' management, i.e. user privileges modelling the journalist, sub-editor, editor hierarchy as documents are generated, editorially reviewed and published. In this case different users may have different privileges according to their role. Wikis, as a class of CMS, usually have a more democratic nature, expecting all participants to take responsibility for editorial decisions and quality.

CoP, Community of Practice
The term Community of Practice is attributed to Jean Lave, and has been popularised in her writings and those of colleague Etienne Wenger. It refers to a community of people who share some form of practice in common, whether it is based on working together (e.g. a group of teachers at a school), or working in the same field (e.g. computer programmers working with the Python language), or in some social context (e.g. golfers). According to these definitions, you can hardly avoid being in a community of practice, whether you are aware of it or not. ¶ There is currently a trend to use the term Community of Practice to refer more specifically to such groups when they become self-aware and organise as such. Thus the Improvement and Development Agency operates an online system hosting about 700 Communities of Practice, which in this sense means people with a similar interest in an aspect of local government work who sign up to an electronic forum to share ideas.

CSS

 * Cascading Style Sheets** — a structured language and a W3C Recommendation ([|see standards document]), used to give precise control over the appearance and behaviour of text and other elements on a Web page, in a manner that can be separated out from the actual HTML markup.

Dependencies (system)
In the context of a discussion of wiki systems, ‘dependencies’ refers to the software components and environmental conditions required to that the system can run. For example a system might require a PHP 5 interpreter, a MySQL database and an Apache web server to be installed on the hosting computer.

Drupal
Drupal is a free, open-source Content Management System written in PHP. It has been developed in a highly modular fashion, with the intention that people can create new behaviours and functionality by the creation of new modules, and modify existing behaviours. One result of this is that Drupal is in use for a wide variety of Web sites, from small blog-like sites to extensive organisational sites which incorporate meeting-management, discussion forums, even wikis. However it is regarded as being one of the more technically challenging CMSs to set up, configure and administer.

Faceted classification
A faceted classification scheme is one that organises the objects in its field of application according to a number of mutually exclusive aspects, and so each object can be classified in a number of different ways. For example, a faceted scheme for classifying works of landscape art could have a time facet, a facet for geographical location, a facet for identifying the artist, and a facet for the kind or artistic technique. The best-known faceted classification scheme is probably the Colon Classification invented by S.R. Ranganathan.

Genre
To editors or document designers, a genre is a class or type of document which carries certain expectations about its structure, its appearance, the kind of language it uses (discursive or clipped, for example. Examples of document genres: newspapers, dictionaries, novels, manuals. One can identify the genre at a glance, and in reading we expect a genre document to let us use it efficiently in ways that we have learned by using other documents in the same genre.

Hashtag
A hashtag is a form of metadata tag for use in text-based information services such as microblogging systems which do not have a separate field where metadata tags can be recorded, for example in Twitter and Identi.ca. The hashtag must be a string of characters without an internal space, and proceded by the symbol **# ** which is sometimes called ‘hash’. For example if we were able to establish that the hashtag //#kidmmwiki// were to be used in any Twitter messages (‘tweets’) about this wiki, people using Twitter would be able to search the system for that hashtag to see all our Twitter messages on that subject.

HTML

 * Hypertext Markup Language**. This is the markup language used to give structure to web pages. In a wiki system HTML is the markup in the files that are returned to the user’s Web browser to lay out the page.

JavaScript
This is a scripting language which can be contained within the HTML for Web pages, and is interpreted and acted upon by all modern Web browsers, to allow for certain kinds of interactivity between the user and the page without necessitating a further round-trip back to the web server. There is one wiki system, TiddlyWiki, where the entire wiki functionality is performed by JavaScript, meaning the wiki will work from your hard disk, from a USB stick or from a Web site with zero system dependencies.

Metadata
Sometimes defined as ‘data about data’, metadata is a term for data that is //associated with// items of data in order to provide them with additional context. Usually this is so that the primary data can be more efficiently and accurately handled. ¶ The term metadata entered the vocabulary informally rather than by definition, and as a result has different meanings for different user communities. In data management and data processing, metadata provides information about the fields in a database system; so, if the primary datum stored in the field is simply a number such as ‘2013’, the metadata defines e.g. whether this is a year-date or an amount of currency; and in the latter case, what is the currency, and whether it is a credit or a debit amount. Metadata may also define a field’s permitted contents, such as ‘a number in hexadecimal format with exactly six digits’. ¶ In the early 1990s the term metadata was also taken up by librarians and information scientists. Since for such users the ‘primary data’ is the //content// of books and journals, online articles, images etc, the term ‘metadata’ for such users is primarily equivalent to catalogue data: such information as the name of the author, the date of publication, and indications of the subject, which could be applied by tagging from a descriptive vocabulary (whether controlled or uncontrolled), or by assigning a numerical classification code e.g. from the Dewey Decimal System.

Microblogging
Microblogging is the use of an Internet service which enables the publishing of short status-update messages, to be viewed either by anyone, or by a group of people defined by the user. The emphasis of such messages is usually to say what the sender is doing or observing, or to draw attention to media elsewhere on the Web. The best known microblogging service at present is [|Twitter], but by referring to the general term one can encompass other such services (e.g. [|Plurk], [|Jaiku], [|identi.ca]) and also mean the ‘status update’ messages of a more general social networking system such as Facebook. There is a proposal for an Open MicroBlogging standard that would allow for the passage of such micromessages between similar systems.

Ning
Ning is a commercial service which provides a Web-based platform on which people can run their own social networks — facilities somewhat similar to Facebook or MySpace, but grouped around a particular topic of interest of your own choosing. The name is a Chinese word for ‘peace’ (宁). Ning was founded in 2005 by Marc Andreessen (an author of the //Mosaic// browser and founder of Netscape) with Gina Bianchini. The features of a Ning social network site includes profile pages, discussion forums, places to post photos and videos etc. However, it is weak on wiki-like features (where texts can be edited collectively).

Open Source
Open Source software (OSS) is software that is released in such a way that its source code (the original programming code) is made publicly available, and released with a form of end-user licence that permits any user to modify the source code, on condition that any derived software is released to the public on exactly the same conditions. The implied contrast is with ‘proprietary’ software, where only the compiled binaries are released, and the end-user licence prohibits code re-use. Many OSS programs are developed collaboratively by worldwide teams of independent programmers.
 * ¶ ** Well-known examples of Open Source software are: the Linux operating system, the OpenOffice application suite, the Firefox browser, the Apache Web server, the Drupal CMS, the Android phone operating system.
 * ¶ ** There is often an expectation that Open Source software will be free of charge as well. This is often so, but there are plenty of examples where Open Source software is incorporated in a package that is offered for sale. Thus the company Red Hat packages the Linux operating system for enterprises in a distribution that includes round-the-clock service; and HTC manufactures phones running on Android, and the phones are not free...

PDF

 * Portable Document Format**, evolved by Adobe Systems, Inc for the interchange of preformatted electronic files. A more object-oriented and indexed version of the resolution-independent, platform-independent model for page description first developed as PostScript. Standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008. For more information visit [].

PHP
Originally **Personal Home Page** language, PHP is a scripting language which is used to provide the programming for a number of wikis, such as MediaWiki.

Scribd
Scribd is a commercial service for hosting page-oriented documents on the Web and making them available either to all without restriction, or to a limited group. Documents may be uploaded in a variety of formats: Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint; OpenOffice text, spreadsheet and presentation formats; PDF or PostScript; plain text and RTF. They are then converted to Scribd’s own iPaper format, which is a streaming format based on Adobe Flash. All Scribd documents live on Scribd’s own servers, but as with YouTube videos or Slideshare presentations, code can be placed on your own blog or similar Web site so they can be viewed //in situ//. Scribd service users can also make their original document formats available for download.

Scripting language
A scripting language is a form of computer programming language which allows for the control of a software application. The ‘scripts’ which are created in such languages can be read and edited in a text processor with //relative// ease; they are not compiled to native machine code, and they are interpreted at runtime. Scripting languages evolved from batch languages/job control languages created to control other applications. By way of illustration, we can say that (a) //Firefox// is a web browser application that is written in C/C++ and compiled to the specific native code for Windows, Mac or Linux environments, whereas (b) //JavaScript// is a scripting language which can be embedded in Web page code in order to get Firefox and other browsers to do specific things. ¶ Scripting languages are particularly important in the world of Content Management System development, because the functionality of reading and writing to databases, transforming texts and compiling HTML and JavaScript for transmission to users’ Web browsers, is generally performed by scripts in such languages as PHP and Perl.

SGML
Standard Generalized Markup Language defined in //ISO 8879:1986 Information Processing -- Text and Office Systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)//. Publishing industry standard for information processing based on the ANSI Generalized Markup Language. Forms basis for HTML, WebSGML and XML.

Tag (metadata)
A tag is a keyword assigned to a piece of computerised information such as a Web page, a blog posting, a photograph and so on, for the purpose of describing it in short form; as such, it is an example of metadata. The purpose of tagging content is to allow it to be easily found again through a browsing or searching interface. For example, here on Wikispaces each page we create can be given a number of tags. The use of tagging arose with Web 2.0-type sites, such as the photo-sharing site Flickr. Depending on the system, one may be able to tag only material one has posted oneself, or add tags to other people’s contributions. Tagging rarely follows any established classificatory vocabulary, and this freedom from constraint and mass participatory aspect have led to the term ‘folksonomy’ to describe the informal classification that arises as the result of mass tagging activity. (See also hashtag.)

Tag cloud
A tag cloud is a visual display of the user-generated tags which have been used to describe the content on a Web site (see Tag, metadata above). The tags are usually single words, and these are usually displayed in alphabetical order, but the size and colour of the displayed tags will be manipulated so that those terms which have been used the most are the ones which display with greater prominence. The tags which display in the cloud are hyperlinked, so that clicking on any of them will take the reader to a listing of all the items which were given that tag.

**Taxonomy**
Taxonomy, as an abstract noun, is the practice and science of classification, from the Greek //τάξις//, //taxis// ('order', 'arrangement') and //νόμος//, //nomos// (literally 'law', by extension 'science'). But when we speak of ‘a taxonomy’, the usual meaning is of //one particular classification scheme// — and the usual implication is that the things being classified are organised in a hierarchical system, with subtype and supertype relationships, also known as parent-child relationships. For example the Linnean classification of biological organisms uses hierarchical groupings such as Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species, and any one species can occupy only one place in the system. The Dewey Decimal System is similarly monohierarchical. ¶ The term ‘taxonomy’ is sometimes used in a looser sense to refer to any classification scheme, including polyhierarchical ones i.e. ones in which a child concept could have more than one parent. In knowledge management circles, the term **ontology** is often used to describe a classification sheme that can be expressive of relationships that are more complex than a simple hierarchy. (See also the discussion page for this Glossary for evolving discussion of this topic.)

Tweet
The name for a message send through the microblogging system Twitter. A tweet may not be longer than 140 characters.

WebSGML
Subset of SGML designed to be used for streamed applications such as the Internet.

Wiki
A collection of interlinked Web pages on a single system, which can be edited easily by its readers using a standard Web browser.

Wiki Farm
A term sometimes used for a service, usually commercial, which hosts a large number of wikis, usually all using the same wiki system. Wikispaces is one example; the system which it uses has no name which we know of. Wikia is another wiki farm service, and in this case we know that the software system used is MediaWiki.

Wiki System
A content management system on a server which provides the service of a Wiki. This means handling storage & linking of pages, history and notification of editing, management of login, members & privileges, discussion system for each page, interpreter for Wiki mark-up (and/or WYSIWYG editing), application of stylesheets & themes, rendering to HTML and syndication (RSS). This Wiki uses the WikiSpaces Wiki System.

Wikispaces
A commercial service, based in San Francisco, which hosts wikis.

Wikitext
A generic name for a simplified form of text mark-up which is used to add structure, links etc to the text of a wiki. A wikitext ‘language’ is easier to learm and use than HTML (qv), and often incorporates markup that invokes special features of the wiki system, such as inclusion of an automated table of contents, or automated footnotes. There is no one //standard// wikitext mark-up language. Some wiki systems let you edit content using a visual editor, but access to more advanced features of the wiki may require learning the wikitext.

XHTML
The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is a family of current and future document types and modules that reproduce, subset, and extend HTML, reformulated in XML rather than SGML. For more information visit [].

XML
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879:1986). Originally designed (in 1996) to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. For more information visit [].

XSL
The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to translate XML and SGML documents into displayable formats, such as HTML and PDF. It has two parts, XSL Transformations (XSLT) and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL/FO). For more information visit [].