1.7. Glossary

business process:

A structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action. Taking a process approach implies adopting the customer’s point of view. Processes are the structure by which an organization does what is necessary to produce value for its customers. (Davenport 1993)

caching technique:

Caching is a technique widely used in computing to increase performance by keeping frequently accessed or expensive data in memory. In the context of a Web application, caching is used to retain pages or data across HTTP requests and reuse them without the expense of recreating them.
There are different types of caching is used in a web application, ASP.Net e.g. supports the following:

Output caching, which caches the dynamic response generated by a request.
Fragment caching, which caches portions of a response generated by a request.
Data caching, which caches data programmatically.

channel:

One of many information sources of one application area.

data integrator:

Organization which combigns variable data and databases of different functional units for a specific application area.

market analysis:

Documented investigation of a Market that is used to inform a firm's planning activities particularly around decision of: inventory, purchase, work force expansion/contraction, facility expansion, purchases of capital equipment, promotional activities, and many other aspects of a company. (Krees et al. 1994)

modules:

Modules are those components that high level services consist of. Modules exist like mapping, positioning, attribute search etc..

portal:

A Portal is used to integrate modules of high level services and to make them accessible to the users of a service.

prototyping:

Process of quickly putting together a working model (a prototype) in order to test various aspects of a design, illustrate ideas or features and gather early user feedback. Prototyping is often treated as an integral part of the system design process, where it is believed to reduce project risk and cost. Often one or more prototypes are made in a process of iterative and incremental development where each prototype is influenced by the performance of previous designs, in this way problems or deficiencies in design can be corrected. When the prototype is sufficiently refined and meets the functionality, robustness, manufacturability and other design goals, the product is ready for production.

shadowing:

Observation of a user with the application in the envisaged context of use. In shadowing, a researcher follows a user during their time with the system, observing and recording any problems and questions the user has. The researcher never offers any information but only answers the questions of the shadowed visitors.

substitution services:

Substitution services are sources of information the location-based service aims to replace. Examples are web sites, field guides for flora and fauna (e.g. bird books), CD-ROMs, and paper maps. On the one hand the LBS needs to go beyond what these can supply, on the other they need to integrate information found in these sources to provide a new channel for presenting them.

value-chain:

Business management concept. Describes a chain of activities a product passes through. The value-chain gives the product more added value than the sum of added values of all activities.

Cartography for Swiss Higher Education

1.7. Glossary