An affordance is a concept from cognitive science that identifies the potential of an object, that is, what a person can do with it. It is the complement of a constraint.
An affordance is a concept from cognitive science that identifies the potential of an object, that is, what a person can do with it. It is the opposite of a constraint.
An API is, in the most generic sense, a published commitment on the part of a person or business entity to expose certain functionality, behavior, or semantics of an information system under their control. In the sense in which we are more accustomed, an API refers to a specific class of software that implements this functionality on the Web.
C is a general-purpose programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s, which is basically the backbone for everything else.
A call graph is a statistical representation of code as it is being executed, useful for determining the code's actual behavior. A call graph generally makes use of AST to produce meaningful results.
In the parlance of design, a constraint is any construct that either inhibits or prohibits certain activity within a given context. Constraints also exist within the process of design itself, such as those of resources like time and money, which often dictate the course of action. The complement of a constraint is called an affordance.
A controlled vocabulary can be understood as both a document and a database of valid terms for a particular information domain.
Cybertext is a generalization of the concept of hypertext to include non-deterministic processes.
A data (or file format, or serialization format) is a set of rules for turning a data structure into a sequence of bytes which can be stored or transported. The term is also used when speaking about instances of such serializations.
Data interchange is the transmission of data across information system boundaries in a manner that keeps the meaning of the data intact.
A database is any persistent storage facility for digital information. Databases can be embedded in applications, or be stand-alone online resources accessed over a network. File systems are a form of database, as are relational (SQL) databases and (RDF or otherwise) graph stores.
Dense Hypermedia is a style of Hypermedia where the entities are small, and the links that connect them together are numerous. Contrast this with ordinary Hypermedia, where entities are large and the links are sparse. A benefit of Dense Hypermedia is the ability to communicate complex concepts, structures, and relationships between concepts and structures.
DOAP is an RDF vocabulary for expressing mainly open-source software projects.
A directed graph is a mathematical object consisting of a set of nodes and a set of ordered pairs that connect the nodes together. Directed graphs are absolutely everywhere in computing.
XML, while scorned and vilified by contemporary Web developers, is still a usable standard framework for expressing ordered-tree data structures.
The Fifteen Fundamental Properties/Transformations are a conceptual framework invented by Christopher Alexander and described at length in The Nature of Order. They describe certain empirically observable geometric properties in (built) space that are associated with Alexander's conceptualizations of "wholeness" and "life". They also represent structure-preserving transformations that take a region of space from a state of the given geometric property being weakly-expressed to being expressed more strongly.
In the proposed process model, a fitness variable is an affirmative statement derived from evidence gathered in the context, which is construed as a statement of fact. It is a tighter statement than a requirement insofar as it has specific constraints on its language and scope.
In the proposed process model, the form is the part of the composition that complements the context — it is ultimately what the client seeks to acquire and what the architect seeks to define. The form also refers to the part of the project scaffold that is home to successive incarnations of what is to become the finished product, including the product itself.
Hypermedia is a generalization of the concept of hypertext, to include audiovisual content.
Hypertext is a style of text where segments of content are connected together by links.
HTML is, of course, the lingua franca of the Web.
In information systems, an identifier is a symbol, word, or token that is associated with an information resource, that (ideally) uniquely identifies it.
Information infrastructure is the information system that helps a person or organization manage and organize its stocks and flows of information. As with any information system, the information is more significant than whatever technology is used to manipulate it.
An information system can be understood as a system (a whole made of mutually-interacting parts) for storing, operating over, and moving information. While specific information technologies may influence the behavior of the system, how the information system does what it does is secondary to what it does.
An interface can be understood as a junction between two or more systems or media. Interfaces are closely related to protocols, with a possible distinction that an interface is biased toward space, while a protocol is biased toward time.
An isomorphism can be understood as a perfect, 1:1 relation between two sets, such that every element in one set has exactly one counterpart in the other. In computing, an isomorphism is the pair of operations that transform the elements from one set to the other. For example, the "zip" and "unzip" algorithms, together, form an isomorphism.
Levels of Scale are one of the fifteen fundamental properties and transformations Christopher Alexander described in his magnum opus, The Nature of Order.
When a piece of content is machine-actionable (computable), it means that either is or contains formal syntax and semantics that can be directly accessed by a computer program without any additional processing or interpretation.
All digital data segments are in principle machine-readable, the question is to what extent can the machine do anything meaningful with it. A CSV file, for example, is machine-readable such that it can be read into a spreadsheet program, but contains no embedded semantics beyond the fact that the lines signify rows in a grid, and the commas signify columns. In other words, it can be displayed, but the actual contents of the CSV are meaningless without some outside cue.
A nearly-decomposable system (Simon 1969) is one whose network of components, and the interactions between them, are almost sparse enough—but not quite—for the system to be decomposable into a strict hierarchy of parts. This means that work on or around the system can be mostly partitioned, but there may be some surprises.
An open data standard is a specification for a content type or network protocol that has the principal characteristic that you don't have to pay to use or even see it. Specificatons for open data standards are therefore freely available and almost always online.
A pattern (of software development) is a repeatable strategy or tactic for solving particular classes of well-defined problems. A pattern is more abstract than a software module. Whereas a module is implemented in a particular language and exposes functionality, patterns can be implemented in any language and govern behaviour.
PHP is a popular interpreted programming language for making web pages.
Post-industrial activity (economic or otherwise) is that which is concerned chiefly with organizing, disseminating, and manipulating information, in contrast to industrial activity which is concerned with doing the same with matter.
Once upon a time I considered modelling a process for working with strictly post-industrial (i.e. symbol-oriented) media.
A programming language is a formal language in which software is written.
A pure function—a necessary distinction in computing, as in mathematics, a function is just a relation, and inherently “pure”—is a procedure that takes an input and returns a value without causing any side effects. This makes them very predictable and well-behaved development targets. Pure functions, like their mathematical counterparts, are therefore composable.
R is both a language and programming environment designed for statistical computing.
An RDF vocabulary is a set of terms specifying classes of resources, properties those resources exhibit, and value ranges for those properties. An RDF vocabulary can either be represented in RDF Schema or OWL (Web Ontology Language), which has additional features.
RDFa (RDF in Attributes) describes a set of markup attributes that carry RDF data, which can be embedded in HTML or an XML host language. This enables the semantic data to piggyback on the markup structure and often reuse the same content.
RDF is a W3C open standard framework for the encoding of data semantics. RDF uses URIs to uniquely identify information resources and the semantic relations between them. It is important to understand that RDF is not a syntax; there are many syntaxes available that will encode RDF.
Semiotics is the study of signs.
The making of software, which I trust the audience is familiar with.
A specificity gradient is the idea that a conceptual structure can be organized by increasing detail and specificity, from plain language to highly specialized concepts, until they can ultimately be operated over by a computer.
Structured Query Language is a standardized fourth-generation programming language for accessing and manipulating relational databases.
In computing, state can be understood as the sum total of all the information needed to reconstruct a process at a particular instant. This in principle makes state an observable, describable, quantifiable object, and potentially an addressable information resource in its own right.
In programming, a subroutine is a procedure that has been demarcated from the rest of the program somehow, often (but not exclusively) by giving it a name.
Scalable Vector Graphics is an XML vocabulary for doing what it says on the tin.
A uniform resource identifier is exactly what the name says: an identifier (text symbol) for (information, chiefly) resources which is (syntactically) uniform.
A uniform resource locator is a subset of URI which specifies a protocol-specific network resource which can be de-referenced, that is to say accessed.
The UUID is a 128-(actually 122, after you remove the control bits)-bit identifier that is particularly useful for naming things when you don't want to spend time coming up with a name for them. By various mechanisms, not the least of which being their size, UUIDs are all but guaranteed to be unique. Hence the name.
UX design, erstwhile called interaction design, is the strategic discipline of crafting the process of using a (often but not exclusively software) product. It is closely related to information architecture and content strategy.
A user interface is an interface that comes in direct contact with a human.