Glossary

Fuzzy logic is a reasoning paradigm that deals with approximate or imprecise information by enabling variables to be described (often linguistically) and acted upon in terms of their degree of membership in predetermined sets. Control systems in electronic equipment and consumer products and other embedded control systems are among the most popular applications.

A geographic information system (GIS) is a collection of computer hardware, software and geographic data for capturing, managing, analyzing and displaying every form of geographically referenced information, often called spatial data.

Gesture control is the ability to recognize and interpret movements of the human body in order to interact with and control a computer system without direct physical contact. The term “natural user interface” is becoming commonly used to describe these interface systems, reflecting the general lack of any intermediate devices between the user and the system.

GPS is a global positioning technology that was introduced in the U.S. in 1996, and was originally developed for military purposes. To determine the position of a mobile device, the GPS system uses from two to six of its 24 satellites to a high level of accuracy—of within just a few meters.

Glonass is a global satellite positioning system run by the Russian Ministry of Defence. It runs parallel to the U.S. GPS system and the planned Galileo system [currently being built by the European Union (EU) and European Space Agency (ESA), and its signals can be reached by any user of a Glonass receiver globally (once all satellites are available).

HIPAA, which became effective in August 1997, calls for electronic data interchange (EDI) use in medical transactions and also calls for protecting patient healthcare information. Enterprises face fines of up to $250,000 and 10 years imprisonment for wrongfully disclosing patient information.

See also HIPAA

Identity and access management (IAM) is the security discipline that enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons.

IAM addresses the mission-critical need to ensure appropriate access to resources across increasingly heterogeneous technology environments, and to meet increasingly rigorous compliance requirements. This security practice is a crucial undertaking for any enterprise. It is increasingly business-aligned, and it requires business skills, not just technical expertise.

Enterprises that develop mature IAM capabilities can reduce their identity management costs and, more importantly, become significantly more agile in supporting new business initiatives.

Intellectual property traditionally includes assets that are protected through regulatory methods such as patents, copyrights and regulatory licenses; however, this protection is being expanded to include software and business processes when these can be demonstrated to be original, novel and non-obvious. Customer intelligence and business intelligence may be considered intellectual “property” by its owner, depending on its value to enterprise competitiveness and its integration into business processes.

Intranet is a network internal to an enterprise that uses the same methodology and techniques as the Internet. It is not necessarily connected to the Internet and is commonly secured from it using firewalls. Intranets often use an organization’s local-area networks (LANs) or wide-area networks (WANs). Services include websites, collaboration, workflow and messaging services, and application development.

IT Governance (ITG)

IT governance (ITG) is defined as the processes that ensure the effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve its goals. IT demand governance (ITDG—what IT should work on) is the process by which organizations ensure the effective evaluation, selection, prioritization, and funding of competing IT investments; oversee their implementation; and extract (measurable) business benefits. ITDG is a business investment decision-making and oversight process, and it is a business management responsibility. IT supply-side governance (ITSG—how IT should do what it does) is concerned with ensuring that the IT organization operates in an effective, efficient and compliant fashion, and it is primarily a CIO responsibility.

ITIL (formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is an  IT service management framework owned by Axelos — a joint venture between the U.K. government and Capita. ITIL is structured as five core books to cover the full-service life cycle: service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement.

JavaScript is a scripting language targeted specifically to the Internet. It is the first scripting language to fully conform to ECMAScript, the Web’s only standard scripting language. Despite its name, JavaScript is not a derivative of Java; its origin is Netscape’s Livescript language. JavaScript is, in fact, closer to C/C++ in syntax than it is to Java.

The term “Java” can be applied to Sun’s Java platform or to its Java programming language. The Java platform is made up of a set of technologies that provide cross-platform, network-centric computing solutions. The programming language is simply one aspect of the Java platform. The elements of the Java platform include the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which provides a uniform Java byte code emulator for Java’s cross-platform runtime environment; the Java programming language, which provides a robust, object-oriented language for constructing Java components and applications; and the standard Java-class library packages, which provide sets of reusable services that promote consistency among components and applications.

The Java programming language is based on C and extends and complements the basic capabilities of HTML. Java permits the creation of applications and application modules (called “applets”) that run in the JVM on the browser. Browsers from Netscape and Microsoft have a JVM. Java’s platform independence and security are designed in, rather than added on, so applications can run on a wide variety of desktop platforms as long as they can run a Java-enabled browser.

Korea Communications Commission (KCC) - The broadcasting, communications and IT regulator in the Republic of South Korea, which superseded the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and the Korean Broadcasting Commission in 2008.

Knowledge management (KM) is a business process that formalizes the management and use of an enterprise’s intellectual assets. KM promotes a collaborative and integrative approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of information assets, including the tacit, uncaptured knowledge of people.

Linux is a Unix-based computer OS and was originally designed as free software for open-source development. Its source code can be freely modified, used and redistributed by anyone under the GNU Public License. Several GUIs run on top of Linux, including K Desktop Environment and GNU Network Object Model Environment. Of the many distributions of Linux, the most-popular enterprise versions include those from Red Hat (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Novell (SUSE Enterprise Linux), Ubuntu and Debian, and regional ones, such as Mandriva, Red Flag and Asianux. There are two Linux subsegments, Linux (client) and Linux (server), in our segmentation.

Load balancing is the ability of processors to schedule themselves to ensure that all are kept busy while instruction streams are available.

A mainframe is a large-capacity computer system with processing power that is significantly superior to PCs or midrange computers. Traditionally, mainframes have been associated with centralized, rather than distributed, computing environments. Skilled technicians are required to program and maintain mainframes, although client/server technology has made mainframes easier to operate from the user’s and programmer’s perspectives. They are generally used by large organizations to handle data processing for enterprisewide administrative tasks like payroll or accounts payable.

A mashup is an assembly of existing software and data services into new Web-based solutions.

A mobile earth station refers to a radio transmitter or receiver situated on a ship, aircraft or other vehicle, used for satellite communications.