ADNOM - European Network for Administrative Nomenclature (http://www.cen.eu/cenorm/businessdomains/businessdomains/isss/activity/adnom.asp). CEN/ISSS Workshop that was active from April 2005 until February 2006. Its results were published in CWA 15526:2006 (ftp://ftp.cenorm.be/PUBLIC/CWAs/e-Europe/ADNOM/CWA15526-00-2006-Mar.pdf)

CEN - European Committee for Standardization (http://www.cen.eu/).

CEN/ISSS - CEN Information Society Standardization System (http://www.cen.eu/ISSS/). CEN/ISSS is the name given to CEN's ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) sector activities. It provides market players with a comprehensive and integrated range of standardization services and products, in order to contribute to the success of the Information Society in Europe.

CLDR - Common Locale Data Repository (http://unicode.org/cldr/). Unicode project providing key building blocks for software to support the world's languages.

Cultural Element - A data item for computer use that may vary dependent on language, territory, or other cultural circumstances (ISO/IEC 15897 - http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=29452)

CWA - CEN Workshop Agreement (http://www.cen.eu/cenorm/sectors/sectors/isss/cen+workshop+agreements/index.asp). Consensus-based specifications, drawn up in an open Workshop environment.

Dublin Core - Cross-domain metadata standard (http://dublincore.org/).

eBusiness - Electronic business may be defined as the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of all the activities of business. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_business)

ebXML - Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language (http://www.ebxml.org/). A modular suite of specifications that enables enterprises of any size and in any geographical location to conduct business over the Internet.

ebXML RR systems - Registry and Repository solution specified by the ebXML consortium (http://www.ebxml.org/).

eGovernment - (from electronic government, also known as e-gov, digital government, online government or in a certain context transformational government) refers to the use of internet technology as a platform for exchanging information, providing services and transacting with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government)

eGovernment Focus Group - Group established by CEN/ISSS CEN/ISSS to map the various activities in the field of eGovernment standardization and to discuss a roadmap for the future (http://www.cen.eu/CENORM/sectors/sectors/isss/activity/e-government.asp). In early 2008, the Focus Group published its final report (http://www.cen.eu/CENORM/sectors/sectors/isss/activity/finalreport1.pdf).

eServices - A highly general/generic term usually referring to the provision of services via the Internet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Services)

FOAF - Friend Of A Friend (http://www.foaf-project.org/). Project creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do; it is a contribution to the linked information system known as the Web. FOAF defines an open, decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.

ICT - Information Communication Technology, an umbrella term that includes all technologies for the manipulation and communication of information.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_communication_technology)

INSPIRE (Directive) - European Directive establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/). INSPIRE intends to trigger the creation of a European spatial information infrastructure that delivers to the users integrated spatial information services. These services should allow the users to identify and access spatial or geographical information from a wide range of sources, from the local level to the global level, in an inter-operable way for a variety of uses. Directive 2007/2/EC (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:L:2007:108:SOM:EN:HTML) of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) was published in the official Journal on the 25th April 2007. The INSPIRE Directive entered into force on the 15th May 2007.

LISA - The Localization Industry Standards Association (http://www.lisa.org/). Consortium of companies and organizations involved in localization, globalization and related industries.

Locale - An identifier that refers to a set of user preferences that tend to be shared across significant swaths of the world (Unicode TR35 - http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/).

Metadata - (meta data, or sometimes metainformation) is "data about data", of any sort in any media. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items and hierarchical levels, for example a database schema. In data processing, metadata is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other data managed within an application or environment.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata)

ONIX - The ONIX for Books Product Information Message is the international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information in electronic form (http://www.editeur.org/onix.html).

Ontology - In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science))

OWL - Web Ontology Language (http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/). Ontology language that is compatible with the World Wide Web in general, and the Semantic Web in particular.

PEGS - Pan-European eGovernment Services. See for example the study assessing stakeholder requirements (http://www.epractice.eu/document/960).

Portal or Web portal - a site that provides a single function via a web page or site. Web portals often function as a point of access to information on the World Wide Web. Portals present information from diverse sources in a unified way. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal)

Protocol - a convention or standard that controls or enables the connection, communication, and data transfer between two computing endpoints. In its simplest form, a protocol can be defined as the rules governing the syntax, semantics, and synchronization of communication. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_(computing))

PSI Directive - Directive on the re-use of public sector information (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/docs/pdfs/directive/psi_directive_en.pdf) that deals with the way public sector bodies should enhance re-use of their information resources. The Directive 2003/98/EC of 17 November 2003 was published in the Official Journal (L345/90) on 31 December 2003. See also: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/actions_eu/policy_actions/index_en.htm.

RDF - Resource Description Framework (http://www.w3.org/RDF/). RDF integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.

Registry - a storage location in where metadata definitions are stored and maintained in a controlled method. A registry can be compared to a phone book registering many different entries and their references. It is typically used for describing and discovering elements (see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/regrep).

Repository - a database which is containing and managing data enties which are often described by registries. Repositories typically support a queriable message store, versioning and loggin/auditing functionality (see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/regrep).

REST - Representational State Transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. An important concept in REST is the existence of resources (sources of specific information), each of which is referenced with a global identifier (e.g., a URI in HTTP). In order to manipulate these resources, components of the network (clients and servers) communicate via a standardized interface (e.g., HTTP) and exchange representations of these resources (the actual documents conveying the information). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer).

Semantic Web - a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/). It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Service - According to the European NESSI Initiative, a service is an abstract entity consisting of a set of capabilities offered by one or more providers to consumers. The service is provided by means of consumer service requests. The capabilities of the service and information how to use these capabilities are described in a service description. It can be realized by living beings, information systems, machines, etc. (source: http://www.nexof-ra.eu/node/212)

Services Directive - European Directive 2006/123/EC (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32006L0123:EN:NOT) with the objective to to achieve a genuine Internal Market in services by removing legal and administrative barriers to the development of service activities between Member States. See also: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/services/services-dir/proposal_en.htm

SKOS - SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System (http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/). SKOS is a specification to support the use of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web.

SPARQL - query language for RDF (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/). SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs.

Taxonomy - Taxonomy (from Greek taxis meaning arrangement or division and nomos meaning law) is the science of classification according to a pre-determined system, with the resulting catalog used to provide a conceptual framework for discussion, analysis, or information retrieval. (http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci331416,00.html#)

Topic Maps - International Standard (ISO 13250) providing a standardized notation for interchangeably representing information about the structure of information resources used to define topics, and the relationships between topics. (http://www.isotopicmaps.org/).

Unicode (Consortium) - The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards(http://unicode.org/).

Web Service - A software service designed to support interoperable XML based machine-to-machine interaction over a network (http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-gloss/). It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL).

XTM - XML Topic Maps (http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/). Specification that provides a model and grammar for representing the structure of information resources used to define topics, and the associations (relationships) between topics.