Our Glossary

Ad Hoc Reports: Ad Hoc Reporting allows end users to easily build their own reports and modify existing ones with little to no training. Ad hoc reporting generates reports that meet individual information requirements quickly and easily, allowing end users to dynamically modify and drill through report data for powerful information analysis. This type of flexibility frees up valuable IT resources and gets information to end users immediately, empowering them to interact with the data.

Agile (Methodology) - Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Well-known agile software development methods include:

    Agile Modeling
    Agile Unified Process (AUP)
    Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
    Essential Unified Process (EssUP)
    Extreme Programming (XP)
    Feature Driven Development (FDD)
    Open Unified Process (OpenUP)
    Scrum
    Velocity tracking

Architecture A framework or structure that portrays relationships among all the elements of the subject force, system, or activity. The fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution. (ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010). The structure of components, their relationships and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time.

BPEL – Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), short for Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Processes in Business Process Execution Language export and import information by using web service interfaces exclusively.

Business Reference Model (BRM) - Business reference model is a reference model, concentrating on the functional and organizational aspects of the core business of an enterprise, service organization or government agency - it is one of the five core models that make up the FEAF and also represents a key input to the vocabulary package development process.

Business Rules Engine - is a software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. In any IT application, business rules change more frequently than the rest of the application code. Rules engines or inference engines are the pluggable software components that execute business rules that have been externalized from application code as part of a business rules approach.

BPM - Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process.

Canned Reports - In Business Intelligence, this refers to a predefined report rather than an ad hoc report or query.

Canonical Model - A Canonical Model is a design pattern used to communicate between different data formats. A form of Enterprise Application Integration, it is intended to reduce costs and standardize on agreed data definitions associated with integrating business systems. A Canonical Model is any model that is canonical in nature, i.e. a model which is in the simplest form possible based on a standard, common view within a given context. Often the term Canonical Model is used interchangeably with Canonical Data Model, an enterprise design pattern which provides common data naming, definition and values within a generalized data framework.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - is a style sheet language (and W3C body of related standards) used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

Conceptual Data Model (CDM) - A conceptual schema or conceptual data model is a map of concepts and their relationships used for databases. This describes the semantics of an organization and represents a series of assertions about its nature. Specifically, it describes the things of significance to an organization (entity classes), about which it is inclined to collect information, and characteristics of (attributes) and associations between pairs of those things of significance (relationships). In the NexGen IT Data Management Methodology, CDMs are developed in coordination with domain ontologies master data business entity identification.

Dashboard - Dashboards often provide at-a-glance views of KPIs relevant to a particular objective or business process (e.g. sales, marketing, human resources, or production).[2] The term dashboard originates from the automobile dashboard where drivers monitor the major functions at a glance. Dashboards give signs about a business letting you know something is wrong or something is right. The corporate world has tried for years to come up with a solution that would tell them if their business needed maintenance or if the temperature of their business was running above normal. Dashboards typically are limited to show summaries, key trends, comparisons, and exceptions. There are five key elements to a good dashboard:
  1. Simple, communicates easily
  2. Minimum distractions…it could cause confusion
  3. Supports organized business with meaning and useful data
  4. Applies human visual perception to visual presentation of information
  5. Comforting to the eye
Data Archive - A data storage solution dedicated to managing long-term records. Retention of records is driven specific compliance directives (e.g. it will be different for various types of A7 data). A Data Archive is different from a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Data Warehouse in that there is no expectation for system level data access. Data Archives are usually offloaded to tape or disk and stored offsite (they can also be used to support COOP system restore operations).

Data as a Service (DaaS) - Data as a service, or DaaS, is a cousin of software as a service[1]. Like all members of the "as a Service" (aaS) family, DaaS is based on the concept that the product, data in this case, can be provided on demand[2] to the user regardless of geographic or organizational separation of provider and consumer. Additionally, the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has rendered the actual platform on which the data resides also irrelevant[3]. This development has enabled the recent emergence of the relatively new concept of DaaS.

Data Reference Model (DRM) - The DRM is a framework whose primary purpose is to enable information sharing and reuse across the United States federal government via the standard description and discovery of common data and the promotion of uniform data management practices. The DRM describes artifacts which can be generated from the data architectures of federal government agencies. The DRM provides a flexible and standards-based approach to accomplish its purpose. The scope of the DRM is broad, as it may be applied within a single agency, within a Community of Interest (COI), or cross-domain COI.

Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) - is an architecture framework for the United States Department of Defense, which provides structure for a specific stakeholder concern through viewpoints organized by various views. DoDAF defines a set of views that act as mechanisms for visualizing, understanding, and assimilating the broad scope and complexities of an architecture description through tabular, structural, behavioral, ontological, pictorial, temporal or graphical means.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - Umbrella term for managing all Enterprise Documents & Content. Encompasses Document Management, Records management, Web Content Management, Collaboration and Business Process management. ERM is typically considered a subset of ECM but some vendors like to keep the products separate. ERM deals with fixed content whereas ECM deals with content creation.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) - an enterprise service bus (ESB) is a software architecture construct which provides fundamental services for complex architectures via an event-driven and standards-based messaging engine (the bus). Developers typically implement an ESB using technologies found in a category of middleware infrastructure products, usually based on recognized standards. An ESB generally provides an abstraction layer on top of an implementation of an enterprise messaging system, which allows integration architects to exploit the value of messaging without writing code.

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) - In software engineering, an Entity – Relationship Diagram model (ER model for short) is an abstract and conceptual representation of data. Entity–relationship modeling is a database modeling method, used to produce a type of conceptual schema or semantic data model of a system, often a relational database, and its requirements in a top-down fashion. Diagrams created by this process are called entity–relationship diagrams or ER diagrams.

Extract Transform Load (ETL) - three database functions that are combined into one tool to pull data out of one database and place them into another database.
  • Extract is the process of reading data from a database.
  • Transform is the process of converting the extracted data from their previous form into the form they need to be in so that they can be placed into another database. Transformation occurs by using rules or looku-p tables or by combining the data with other data.
  • Load is the process of writing the data into the target database.
ETL is used to migrate data from one database to another, to form data marts and data warehouses and also to convert databases from one format or type to another.

JSF (Java Server Faces) - Developed through the Java Community Process under JSR - 314, JavaServer Faces technology establishes the standard for building server-side user interfaces. JSF is a request-driven MVC web framework based on component driven UI design model, using XML files called view templates or Facelets views. Requests are processed by the FacesServlet, which loads the appropriate view template, builds a component tree, processes events, and renders the response (typically HTML) to the client. The state of UI components (and some other objects) is saved at the end of each request (called stateSaving (note: transient true)), and restored upon next creation of that view. Several types of state-saving are available, including Client-side and Server-side state saving. Out of the box, JSF 1.x uses JavaServer Pages (JSP) for its display technology, but can also accommodate other technologies (such as XUL and Facelets). JSF 2 uses Facelets by default for this purpose. Facelets is a more efficient, simple, and yet more powerful view description language (VDL).

Joint Information Environment (JIE): The overarching concept of the Joint Information Environment (JIE) is to develop and engineer a network architecture with enduring flexibility to support existing and future capabilities identified by follow-on DoD programs. Concept Development is led by the Joint Staff, DoD CIO, and US Cyber Command. The goals of the JIE are to establish common IT standards, infrastructure, and architecture through the consolidation of data centers and networks, network infrastructure, and  

Lifecycle Management - Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance. ALM is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.end-user services.

Linked Data - Linked data are a set of best practices for publishing and deploying instance and class data using the RDF data model, and uses uniform resource identifiers (URIs) to name the data objects. The approach exposes the data for access via the HTTP protocol, while emphasizing data interconnections, interrelationships and context useful to both humans and machine agents. This represents a key outcome of the Semantic Web concept.

Logical Data model (LDM) - Logical data models represent the abstract structure of a domain of information. They are often diagrammatic in nature and are most typically used in business processes that seek to capture things of importance to an organization and how they relate to one another. Once validated and approved, the logical data model can become the basis of a physical data model and inform the design of a database. Logical data models should be based on the structures identified in a preceding conceptual data model, since this describes the semantics of the information context, which the logical model should also reflect. Even so, since the logical data model anticipates implementation on a specific computing system, the content of the logical data model is adjusted to achieve certain efficiencies.

Loose Coupling - The binding from the service requester to the service provider should loosely couple the service. This means that the service requester has no knowledge of the technical details of the provider’s implementation, such as the programming language, deployment platform, and so forth. The service requester typically invokes operations by way of messages -- a request message and the response -- rather than through the use of APIs or file formats.

Master Data -  Are data about the business entities that provide context for business transactions (processes). Unlike reference data, master data values are usually not limited to predefined domain values. However, business rules typically dictate the format and allowable ranges of master data values. Master Data is the authoritative, most accurate data available about key business entities, used to establish the context for transactional data. Master Data values are considered Golden. Master data refers to the authoritative, most accurate data available related to important people, places and things of an organization’s business processes.  Master data is identified by business process owners (Program Groups) as requiring special management attention based on the data’s importance to the success of the organization’s business processes and/or its ability to be reused throughout the enterprise.  Master Data is a subset of the data required by the organization’s business processes.  Whereas Reference Data (see definition below) provides a set of (golden) allowable values, Master Data provides the actual data value.

Scrum - Of all the Agile methodologies, Scrum is unique because it introduced the idea of “empirical process control.” That is, Scrum uses the real-world progress of a project — not a best guess or uninformed forecast — to plan and schedule releases. In Scrum, projects are divided into succinct work cadences, known as sprints, which are typically one week, two weeks, or three weeks in duration. At the end of each sprint, stakeholders and team members meet to assess the progress of a project and plan its next steps. This allows a project’s direction to be adjusted or reoriented based on completed work, not speculation or predictions.

Service Composition – The act of executing a service orchestration. This typically involves aggregating several services to perform a certain function.

Service Contract - A service contract is comprised of one or more published documents (called service description documents) that express meta information about a service. The fundamental part of a service contract consists of the service description documents that express its technical interface. These form the technical service contract which essentially establishes an API into the functionality offered by the service

Service Granularity - The granularity of operations is an important design point. The use of coarse-grained interfaces for external consumption is recommended, whereas fine-grained interfaces might be used inside the enterprise. A coarse-grained interface might be the complete processing for a given service, such as SubmitPurchaseOrder, where the message contains all of the business information needed to define a purchase order. A fine-grained interface might have separate operations for: CreateNewPurchaseOrder, SetShippingAddress, AddItem, and so forth.

Service Inventory - A service inventory is an independently standardized and governed collection of complementary services within a boundary that represents an enterprise or a meaningful segment of an enterprise. When an organization has multiple service inventories, this term is further qualified as domain service inventory. In the context of our immediate effort we will be cataloguing an eCS related inventory as well as the beginnings of a common service layer (or inventory) .

Service Level Design - This refers to the ability to utilize either software patterns or specific design guidance in regards to the development of service logic and service contracts. This type of guidance may include recommendations for Granularity (the relative size or scope of the service) as well division of service capabilities through use of functional service categories.

Service Orchestration - Orchestration describes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware, and services. In the context of SOA, Orchestration represents the ability to manage multiple service in context with one another through inclusion in workflows or through designated aggregations across multiple but not necessarily related workflows. The goal of Orchestration is to aid in code reuse by helping to determine where and when logic can be managed across traditional system boundaries.

(SOA) Service-Oriented Architecture - is a flexible set of design principles used during the phases of systems development and integration in computing. A system based on a SOA architecture will package functionality as a suite of interoperable services that can be used within multiple separate systems from several business domains.

Software Governance - Software Governance is a subset of Portfolio Management in that it refers to the ability to manage software management (both through development and sustainment) but it doesn’t necessarily encompass system management or project management considerations. While each organization varies somewhat in how this is approached, common elements include coordinated requirements management and configuration control, hand-off from the development processes, metrics & SLA support, standards and guidance.

Test-driven development (TDD) - is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a desired improvement or new function, then produces code to pass that test and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. It could be considered a variant of Agile methodology.

UDDI - Universal Description, Discovery and Integration is a platform-independent, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based registry for businesses worldwide to list themselves on the Internet and a mechanism to register and locate web service applications. UDDI was originally proposed as a core Web service standard. It is designed to be interrogated by SOAP messages and to provide access to Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents describing the protocol bindings and message formats required to interact with the web services listed in its directory.

Web Service Description Language (WSDL) - WSDL is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services). WSDL is extensible to allow description of endpoints and their messages regardless of what message formats or network protocols are used to communicate, however, the only bindings described in this document describe how to use WSDL in conjunction with SOAP 1.1, HTTP GET/POST, and MIME.



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