An open source enterprise search platform. Its major features include fulltext search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration and rich document (e.g. Word, PDF) handling.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a message-based protocol based on XML for accessing services on the Web. It employs XML syntax to send text commands across the Internet using HTTP. SOAP is similar in purpose to the DCOM and CORBA distributed object systems, but is more lightweight and less programming-intensive. Because of its simple exchange mechanism, SOAP can also be used to implement a messaging system.

A license that requires users of a work to provide the content under the same or similar conditions as the original.

Source: ODH

A popular file format for geodata, maintained and published by Esri, a manufacturer of GIS software. A Shapefile actually consists of several related files. Though the format is technically proprietary, Esri publishes a full specification standard and Shapefiles can be read by a wide range of software, so function somewhat like an open standard in practice.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879:1986) s an ISO-standard for document representation. SGML can be used for publishing in its broadest definition, ranging from single medium conventional publishing to multimedia data base publishing. SGML can also be used in office document processing when the benefits of human readability and interchange with publishing systems are required.

A computer on the internet, usually manged by a hosting company, that responds to requests from a user, e.g. for web pages, downloaded files or to access features in a SaaS package being run on the server.

Source: ODH

Search engine optimisation, a series of techniques which improve the visibility of a website in search engines result page (SERP) via the natural or unpaid (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results. The goal of such optimisation is to rank as high as possible for a certain search query.

An evolution or part of the World Wide Web that consists of machine-readable data in RDF and an ability to query that information in standard ways (e.g. via Sparql).

Statistical data and metadata exchange, an international initiative that aims at standardising and modernising the mechanisms and processes for the exchange of statistical data and metadata among international organisations and their member countries.

Extracting data from a non-machine-readable source, such as a website or a PDF document, and creating structured data from the result. Screen-scraping a dataset requires dedicated programming and is expensive in programmer time, so is generally done only after all other attempts to get the data in structured form have failed. Legal questions may arise about whether the scraping breaches the source website’s copyright or terms of service.