Australian Government Technical Interoperability Framework
5. Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Agency | An Australian Government entity. |
| AGIFT | Australian Governments’ Interactive Functions Thesaurus, for functional description of records, information resources and services. |
| AGLS | Australian Government Locator Service is the Australian Government metadata standard. The AGLS metadata standard was developed to promote consistency of discovery of government resources. AGLS metadata, which is usually invisible to the end user, can be stored in HTML ‘metatags’, in XML, or in a metadata repository or directory that can be interrogated or harvested by external search engines. AGLS is now an official standard. AS 5044, AGLS Metadata Element Set, is the product of collaboration between the National Archives and Standards Australia. Based on an Australian Government standard, AS 5044 AGLS will enable web resources to be described consistently across all government, private and community sectors. |
| DNS | Domain Name System, allows naming and location of Internet sites. |
| ebXML | e-business XML is a joint project of the UN and OASIS to develop an XML standard for business-to-business trade. |
| Fedlink | Is a Virtual Private Network that provides secure and trusted communications across the Internet. |
| FTP | File Transfer Protocol, allows transfer of files between computers over the Internet. FTP is an application protocol. |
| GML | Geography Markup Language, based on XML. |
| Guideline | A statement of desired, good or best practice. |
| HTML | Hypertext Markup Language is the set of markup symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for display on a World Wide Web browser page. |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the set of rules for exchanging files on the World Wide Web. HTTP is an application protocol. |
| HTTPS | HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer, or HTTP over SSL) is a Web protocol developed by Netscape and built into its browser that encrypts and decrypts user page requests as well as the pages that are returned by the Web server. HTTPS is the use of Netscape's Secure Socket Layer (SSL) as a sublayer under its regular HTTP application layering. SSL uses a 40-bit key size for the RC4 stream encryption algorithm, which is considered an adequate degree of encryption for commercial exchange. |
| IETF | Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) coordinates the specification development process and maintains the agreed technical specifications for the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. |
| Integrated | Integrated service delivery (ISD) is the provision of government services (information and transactions) in a customer-oriented manner. |
| Service delivery | Customers have some choice of delivery channel and services from different agencies or jurisdictions are bundled into relevant groups for the convenience of customers. The customer’s service experience across channels is consistent, and customer contact history is available to all channels. Services involving transactions may require interaction with databases in multiple agencies. |
| Interoperability | Is the ability to transfer and use information in a uniform and efficient manner across multiple organisations and information technology systems. It underpins the level of benefits accruing to enterprises, government and the wider economy through e-commerce. |
| Metadata | Metadata is structured information that describes and allows us to find, manage, control and understand other information. In a web environment metadata acts like a virtual library catalogue – it helps government search engines to accurately and efficiently identify and retrieve web-based resources in response to search requests. To ensure that metadata is as useful as possible, it is important that it is applied consistently by agencies across the Australian Government. Recognised resource discovery metadata schemes that are in active use by government in Australia include AGLS and its extensions and ANZLIC (geo-spatial). |
| MIME | MIME (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an extension of the original Internet e-mail protocol that lets people use the protocol to exchange different kinds of data files on the Internet: audio, video, images, application programs, and other kinds, as well as the ASCII text handled in the original protocol, the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). |
| NNTP | Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is the protocol for managing notes posted on Usenet newsgroups. |
| Online service | Online services are services delivered via the Internet. An online service can be simple, such as provision of information, or more complex such as determining entitlement to and applying for a benefit online. |
| Open standards | Open Standards are recognised national or international platform independent standards. They are developed collaboratively through due process, are vendor neutral, do not rely on commercial intellectual property. |
| PKI | A PKI (public key infrastructure) enables users of a basically unsecured public network such as the Internet to securely and privately exchange data and money through the use of a public and a private cryptographic key pair that is obtained and shared through a trusted authority. The public key infrastructure provides for a digital certificate that can identify an individual or an organization and directory services that can store and, when necessary, revoke the certificates. |
| Protocol | Protocol is used to mean agreed ways of working together, that is a common understanding of business rules required to operate a service or exchange data. It also has a specific meaning in IT circles of the special set of rules that end points in a telecommunication connection use when they communicate. Both end points must recognise and observe a protocol. Communications protocols are usually described in an industry or international standard. |
| RDF | The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general framework for semantic description of any Internet resource such as a Web site and its content. |
| SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a TCP/IP protocol used in sending and receiving e-mail. |
| SOAP/XMLP | Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP/XMLP) uses web protocols to exchange from one computer to another. SOAP/XMLP specifies how to encode an HTTP header and an XML file so that one computer program can call a program in another computer and pass it information. It also specifies how to return a response. SOAP is a way for a program running in one kind of operating system (such as Windows 2000) to communicate with a program in the same or another kind of an operating system (such as Linux) by using the World Wide Web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and its Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the mechanisms for information exchange. Since Web protocols are installed and available for use by all major operating system platforms, HTTP and XML provide an already at-hand solution to the problem of how programs running under different operating systems in a network can communicate with each other. SOAP specifies exactly how to encode an HTTP header and an XML file so that a program in one computer can call a program in another computer and pass it information. It also specifies how the called program can return a response. |
| SSL | The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a commonly-used protocol for managing the security of a message transmission on the Internet. SSL has recently been succeeded by Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is based on SSL. SSL uses a program layer located between the Internet's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Transport Control Protocol (TCP) layers. The "sockets" part of the term refers to the sockets method of passing data back and forth between a client and a server program in a network or between program layers in the same computer. |
| Standard | Standard encompasses standards endorsed by a recognised standards setting authority; enacted in legislation; voluntary standards and agreed protocols. |
| Structured Data | Information that has been organised to allow identification and separation of the context of the information from its content. |
| TAGS | The Thesaurus of Australian Government Subjects (TAGS) describes Australian Government information and services from a subject or topic perspective. |
| TCP/IP | Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is the basic communication protocol of the Internet. It can also be used as a communications protocol in a private network. |
| UDDI | Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) provides directory services to discover Internet-based business resources within the "web services" model. |
| W3C | World Wide Web Consortium, the governing body for web standards. (http://www.w3.org/) |
| Web services | Web services are simple, self contained applications which perform functions, from simple requests to complicated business processes. The "web services" model uses WSDL, UDDI and SOAP/XMLP. A WSDL description is retrieved from the UDDI directory. WSDL descriptions allow the software systems of one business to extend to use those of the other directly. The services are invoked over the World Wide Web using the SOAP/XMLP protocol. Each of the components is XML based. Where two agencies know about each other’s web services they can link their SOAP/XMLP interfaces – provided all security concerns are managed appropriately. It is only where services are going to have unknown users that they need to be formally described by a language such as WSDL and entered into a directory such as UDDI. |
| WSDL | Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) describes how to use the software service interfaces of a registered business over the Internet within the "web services" model. |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, Intranets, and elsewhere. |
| XML Schema | Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema definition language for defining the structure, contents and semantics of XML documents. |
| XMLP | XML Protocol, formally SOAP/XMLP, uses web protocols to exchange from one computer to another. SOAP/XMLP specifies how to encode an HTTP header and an XML file so that one computer program can call a program in another computer and pass it information. It also specifies how to return a response. |
| XSL | Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is the language for defining how a browser will display XML content to the user. |
Contact for information on this page: interoperability@finance.gov.au