Glossary week 12

posted May 16, 2010, 3:50 AM by





BigTable is a compressed, high performance, and proprietary database system built on Google File System (GFS), Chubby Lock Service, and a few other Google programs; it is currently not distributed or used outside of Google, although Google offers access to it as part of their Google App Engine.

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal.


Google File System (GFS) is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google Inc. for its own use. It is designed to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters of commodity hardware.



In computing, a distributed file system or network file system is any file system that allows access to files from multiple hosts sharing via a computer network.



Glossary week 10

posted May 16, 2010, 3:48 AM by

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an information system that integrate business activities across departmental boundaries, include planning, manufacturing, sales, marketing

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a corporate level strategy designed to create and maintain lasting relationship with customers by concentrating on the downstream information flows through the introduction of reliable systems, processes, and procedures

Supply chain management (SCM) is an information system focusing on the improving upstream information flows with two main objectives – to accelerate product development and to reduce costs associated with procuring raw materials, components, and services from suppliers.

Business process management (BPM) is a systematic, structured improvement approach by all part of an organization including a critical examination and redesign od business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in one or more performance measures such as quality, cycle time or cost.

Legacy system is an older stand alone computer system within organization with older versions of applications that are either fast approaching or beyond the end of their useful life within the organization.

 Shadow system is a term used in information services for any application relied upon for business processes that is not under the jurisdiction of a centralized information systems department.

Sales force automation (SFA) is a CRM system to support the day – to – day activities of an organization.

Service-oriented architecture is a software architecture in which business processes are broken into individual components that are designed to achieve desired for the service customer.

 Interorganizational system is an informational system that communicates across organizational boundaries.

Glosary week 9

posted May 16, 2010, 3:47 AM by

Business intelligence is the use of information systems to gather and analyze information from internal and external sources in order to make better business decisions.

A transaction processing system is a special class of an information system designed to process business events and transactions.

Online Analytical Processing refers to the process of quickly conducting complex, multidimensional analyses of data stored in a database that is optimized for retrieval, typically using graphical software tools.

Data mining complements OLAP in that it provides capabilities for discovering “hidden” predictive relationships in the data.

Clustering is the process of grouping related records together on the basis of having similar values for attributes.

Classification is used when groups are known beforehand, and records are segmented into these classes.

An information system designed to support the highest organizational manager is called an executive information system.

A decision support system is a special-purpose information system designed to support organizational decision making related to a particular recurring problem.

A what-if-analysis allows you to make hypothetical changes to the data associated with a problem and observe how these changes influence the results.

Groupware refers to a class of software that enables people to work together more effectively.

Artificial intelligence is the science of enabling information technologies to simulate human intelligence.

An expert system is a type of intelligent system that uses reasoning methods based on knowledge about a specific problem domain in order to provide advice.

An intelligent agent is a program that works in the background to provide some service when a specific event occurs.

Visualization refers to the display of complex data relationships using a variety of graphical methods, enabling managers to quickly grasp the results of the analysis.

Glosary week 8

posted Apr 16, 2010, 7:19 AM by

A content management system allows users to publish, edit, version track, and retrieve digital information. Typical roles in a content management system include: creator, editor, administrator, and guest.

Blog is a specialized site that allows people to share a journal or diary posted on the internet.

Crowdsourcing is delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without monetary compensation.

Geo-tagging is tagging information to maps.

A mashup is a new application (or Web site) that integrates one or more Web services.

Metadata can be simply thought of as a data about data.

Netcasting is the distribution of digital media, such as audio or video files via syndication feed for playback on digital media players.

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is a family of syndication feeds used to publish the most current blogs, podcasts, videos, and news stories.

The semantic Web is a set of design principles that will allow computers to be able to better index Web sites, topics, and subjects.

Social networking is the term used to describe the acivity of networking through social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked In.

Tagging is adding descriptive information to Web site content.

Viral marketing is using the network effect to increase brand awareness.

Web services allow data to be accessed without intimate knowledge of other organizations’ systems, enabling machine-to-machine interaction over the Internet. The central idea behind Web services is that any device can use any network to access any service.

Widgets are small interactive tools used for a single purpose such as taking notes, viewing pictures, or simply displaying a clock.

Web-based collaboration tools allow for easy access and easy transferability from one person to another, as the tools can run on any computer with a Web browser and Internet connectivity.

Glossary week 5

posted Apr 16, 2010, 7:18 AM by

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) refers to the structured transmission of data between organizations by electronic means. It is used to transfer electronic documents from one computer system to another, i.e. from one trading partner to another trading partner. It is more than mere E-mail; for instance, organizations might replace bills of lading and even Cheques with appropriate EDI messages. It also refers specifically to a family of standards, including the X12 series. However, EDI also exhibits its pre-Internet roots, and the standards tend to focus on ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)-formatted single messages rather than the whole sequence of conditions and exchanges that make up an inter-organization business process.




Four major categories of eComerce are: B2B, B2C, C2C/P2P, C2B.






Glossary week 4

posted Mar 15, 2010, 1:01 AM by

  •     The productivity paradox is a contradiction between the remarkable advances in computer power and the relatively slow growth of productivity at the level of the whole economy.
  •      Freeconomics—The leveraging of digital technologies to provide free goods and services to customers as a business strategy for gaining competitive advantage
  •      The value chain, also known as value chain analysis, is a concept from business management that was first described and popularized by Michael Porter. A value chain is a chain of activities for a firm operating in a specific industry. The business unit is the appropriate level for construction of a value chain, not the divisional level or corporate level.

  •       Someone with automating perspective thinks of technology as a way to help complete a task within oranization faster, more cheaply and with greater accuracy.
  •     Informating is when technology provides information about its operation and the underlaying work process it supports.
  •     Disruptive Innovations are new technologies, prducts or services that eventually surpass the existing dominant technology or product in a market.


Glossary week 3

posted Mar 4, 2010, 2:57 PM by


Nearshoring (also known as "nearshore outsourcing" and "nearshoring") means sourcing service activities to a foreign, lower-wage country that is relatively close in distance. Nearshoring is becoming competitive with outsourcing to farther areas since the recent rise of fuel costs.







The star schema (sometimes referenced as star join schema) is the simplest style of data warehouse schema. The star schema consists of a few fact tables (possibly only one, justifying the name) referencing any number of dimension tables.

A snowflake schema is a logical arrangement of tables in a multidimensional database such that the entity relationship diagram resembles a snowflake in shape. Closely related to the star schema, the snowflake schema is represented by centralized fact tables which are connected to multiple dimensions.


In data warehousing, a dimension table is one of the set of companion tables to a fact table .The fact table contains business facts or measures and foreign keys which refer to candidate keys (normally primary keys) in the dimension tables. The dimension tables contain attributes (or fields) used to constrain and group data when performing data warehousing queries.

Glossary week2

posted Mar 2, 2010, 11:38 PM by   [ updated Mar 2, 2010, 11:53 PM ]



 Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility (such as electricity, water, natural gas, or telephone network). This system has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire hardware; instead, computational resources are essentially rented. Customers with very large computations or a sudden peak in demand can also avoid the delays that would result from physically acquiring and assembling a large number of computers.


A Storage Service Provider (SSP) is any company that provides computer storage space and related management services.


Grid computing (or the use of computational grids) is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task, usually to a scientific, technical or business problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or the need to process large amounts of data.




Green computing or green IT refers to environmentally sustainable computing or IT. It is "the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems—efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment.


Virtualization is a term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources.








The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a U.S. space-based radio navigation system that provides reliable positioning, navigation, and timing services to civilian users on a continuous worldwide basis -- freely available to all. For anyone with a GPS receiver, the system will provide location and time. GPS provides accurate location and time information for an unlimited number of people in all weather, day and night, anywhere in the world.


Self Managing Autonomic Technology is a group of enabling technologies that support the automation and process changes necessary to deliver end to end IT Service Management solutions.





A data dictionary, a.k.a. metadata repository, as defined in the IBM Dictionary of Computing, is a "centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format." The term may have one of several closely related meanings pertaining to databases and database management systems (DBMS).






Online analytical processing is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries.


An operational system is a term used in data warehousing to refer to a system that is used to process the day-to-day transactions of an organization. These systems are designed so processing of day-to-day transactions is performed efficiently and the integrity of the transactional data is preserved.


Information Systems refers to the interaction between algorithmic processes and technology; it consists of four parts which include: procedures, software, hardware, and information or data, which are essentially the same.

Extract-Transform and Load (ETL) is the processes that enable companies to move data from multiple sources reformat and cleanse it, and load it into another database, a data mart or a data warehouse for analysis, or on another operational system to support a business process.





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