Search-Based Applications. Gregory Grefenstette

Business application Any information processing application used in running a business Cache A rapid computer memory where frequently or recently used data is temporarily stored CAP theorem One cannot achieve Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance at the same time Category A flat or hierarchic semantic dimension added to a document, or part of a document Categorization Assigning, usually through statistical means, one or more categories to text CDM Customer Data Management Cloud services Computer applications that are executed on computers outside the enterprise rather than in-house. Examples are SalesForce, Google Apps, Yahoo mail, etc. Clustering Grouping documents according to content similarity CMS Content Management System Consistency A quality of an information system in which only valid data is recorded; that is, there are not two conflicting versions of the same data Connector A program that extracts information from a certain file format, or from a database Consolidation Making all the data concerning one entity available in one output COTS Commercial off-the-shelf software Crawl Fetching web pages for indexing by following URLs found in each page CRM Customer Relationship Management, applications used by businesses to interact with customers CSIS Customer Service Information System Data integration Merging data from different data sources or different information systems Data mart A subset of data found in an enterprise information system, relevant for a specific group or purpose Data warehouse A database which is used to consolidate data from disparate sources DBA Database administrator, the person who is responsible for maintaining (and often designing) an organization’ database(s) Deep Web Web pages that are dynamically generated as a result of form input and/or database querying Directory A listing of the files or websites in a particular storage system DIS Decision Intelligence System, a computer-based system for helping decision making Document model A model of seeing a database entity as a single persistent document, composed of typed fields and categories corresponding to the entity’s attributes Dublin Core Metadata A standard for metadata associated with documents, such as Title, Creator, Publisher, etc. Durability A database quality that means that successfully completed transactions must persist (or be recoverable) in the case of a system failure EDI Electronic Data Interchange, an early database communication system ETL Extract-Transform-Load, any method for extracting all or part of a database and storing it in another database Enterprise Search Searching access-controlled, structured and unstructured data found within the enterprise ERP Enterprise Resource Planning Evolutive Data Model Model that can be easily extended with new fields or data types without rebuilding the entire data structure Facet A dimension of meaning that can be used for restricting search, for example shirts and coats are two facets that could be found on a shopping site Field A labeled part of a document in a search engine. Fields can be typed to contain text, numbers, dates, GPS coordinates, or categories Firewall A computer-implemented protection that isolates internal company data from outside access File server A service that provides sequential or direct access to computer files Full-text engine A system for searching any of the words found in documents, rather than just a set of manually assigned keywords Garbage collection A process for recovering memory, usually by recognizing deleted or out-of-date data Gartner An information technology research and advisory firm that reports on technology issues GPS Global Positioning System, a system of satellites for geolocating a point on the globe Hash table Hashing converts a data item into a single number, and the hash table maps this number to a list of items Heuristics Methods based more on demonstrated performance than theory, weighting words by their inverse frequency in a collection is an example HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol, an application layer protocol for accessing web pages IDC International Data Corporation, a global provider of market intelligence and analysis concerning information technology ILM Information Lifecycle Management IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol, a format for transmitting emails Index, inverted A data structure that contains lists of words with pointers to where the words are found in documents Index slice One section of an inverted index which can be distributed over many different computer stores Intranet A secure network that gives authorized users Web-style access to an organization’s information assets (e.g., internal documents and web pages) IR Information Retrieval, the study of how to index and retrieve information, usually from unstructured text IS Information System, a generic term for any computer system for storing and retrieving information Isolation The database constraint specifying that data involved in a transaction are isolated from (inaccessible to) other transactions