Application logic can be understood as a special case of content, to the extent that it is software behavior that does something directly germane to a specific application, in contrast to being one or more degrees removed from it, such as with infrastructure or other more broadly-applicable code.
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.
Artificial intelligence can be understood as an umbrella term for computers behaving in (adaptive) ways they were not explicitly programmed to behave. Machine learning is one particular subfield of (and strategy for) artificial intelligence.
Automation is the broad technical program that aims reduce the need for directy human attention on any given task. Automation can be understood as the maturation of mechanization, which only reduces physical labor.
A business ecosystem is a model that situates an organization in the centre of a set of relationships with the entities with which it interacts. Entities like customers may be represented as archetypal classes, whereas certain competitors, important shareholders, or regulatory bodies might be modeled as themselves.
A citation network traces the history of bibliographic references through a body of literature. Citation networks are particularly useful in academic circles, but are insightful assets for any organization or researcher.
Concept scheme is an umbrella term for typologies, taxonomies, dictionaries and glossaries, thesauri, et cetera. A concept scheme typically not only lists a set of concepts and their definitions, but also the (hierarchical or set-theoretic) relationships between them.
Conceptual integrity (Brooks 1975) is the state of affairs wherein a project or its ultimate product(s), and everybody involved, has a unified mental model of what it is and what it's for. Achieving conceptual integrity means decisions come easier and outcomes are more coherent, because there is little to no ambiguity around an optimal course of action.
Content is the information that the user of an information system uses the system for.
After a content inventory, the elements are audited for fitness, correctness, relevance, style, etc., and recommendations are made for amendments, replacements, or supplements.
Content governance is the practice of managing the life cycle of content within an organization, and setting policies for content strategy and information architecture.
Content infrastructure can be understood as the superset of all content management and related systems within an organization.
A content inventory is an exhaustive account of all information resources e.g. on a website, or indeed within an entire organization. The results are typically delivered on one or more spreadsheets, with e.g. a URI or other identifier in the first column, the title in the second, author, date, etc.
Content management is the art and science of dealing with the mass of (usually digital) stuff—usually, but not exclusively text—within an organization.
Content strategy is a broader concept than content management, because it entails more than merely "managing" content, but also concerns the governance, life cycle, technical minutiae, as well as things like style guides for the voice and tone of (usually textual) content.
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.
Data interchange is the transmission of data across information system boundaries in a manner that keeps the meaning of the data intact.
A data structure is an object that associates together a set of slots (properties, fields, dimensions, columns), where each slot has a meaning, and can hold a value, which can possibly be another data structure.
A data vocabulary (or schema) is a controlled vocabulary with additional rigor, such that is strict enough to define a formal data structure. The scope includes the names (identifiers) of members and valid sequences, cardinality constraints, valid data types, and so on. A data vocabulary can be a conventional document, but the more sophisticated ones can be fed directly into a computer.
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 the relationships between them.
Design rationale is the deliberate documentation of the reasons behind a set of decisions. It is useful for forensic purposes in the governance of information systems, e.g. for identifying and eliminating Chesterton's fences.
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.
“Eating one's own dog food” is a quality assurance tactic which means to use one's own products and services. It is attributed to Clement Hirsch, the eccentric erstwhile president of Kal Kan Incorporated, who (apocryphally) would pull the stunt of eating from a can of his company's dog food at shareholder meetings.
Data which is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. FAIR began as an initiative in the scientific community to improve the hygiene around experimental data.
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.
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.
Information architecture is the design of both the topological structure and the semantic content of information systems. The goal of information architecture is to help people situate themselves, understand their surroundings, find the things they're looking for, and even arrange for valuable serendipitous discoveries.
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 resource is a distinct, identifiable object that carries information. On a website, a resource is uniquely identifiable by a URI, aka Web address. On our project, the resource is the basic unit of visible progress. Pages are resources, so are images, videos, etc. Resources can also be the interfaces to programs, take parameters, and process input.
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.
Information technology refers to any technology whatsoever that is made to deal with information. The current state of the art of information technology is computers and related electronic hardware. "IT" can also refer to a department in an organization charged with managing said hardware (and its related software).
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 Intranet is a synonym for a local (e.g. office) computer network. Colloquially, it refers to an internal website or Web application.
Issue-Based Information System refers to a particular methodology for structured argumentation invented by Horst Rittel and collaborators in the late 1960s, intended to provide design rationale and support for solving wicked problems. The system was originally implemented using index cards, though digital versions have existed since the 1980s.
A knowledge graph is a buzzphrase for a database structured as a directed graph, giving it the unique ability to make arbitrary connections between heterogeneous entities within the database. Knowledge graphs may or may not be created on top of RDF. This set of documents is an RDF knowledge graph.
Levels of Scale are one of the fifteen fundamental properties and transformations Christopher Alexander described in his magnum opus, The Nature of Order.
Linked data is an architectural style with considerable overlap with REST, involving making hypermedia resources that contain machine-readable structured data with discernible semantics, in contrast with opaque documents with no machine-readable semantics. A rudimentary form of linked data is in use in SEO circles with JSON-LD.
A local network is a computer network contained within a house, office, or organization.
Machine learning refers to the use of statistical methods to program computers. It is typically what people mean by the term "artificial intelligence".
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.
Metadata is data about data, or in the context of Web content, could be any structured data associated with a webpage.
A networked information service is an umbrella term for systems where computation, to the extent that there is any, happens at the site of the service's operator, and only the resulting information is conveyed over the network.
An ontology (in the sense of computing and information science) differs from a taxonomy, in that a taxonomy organizes categories through a fixed set of (often hierarchical) semantic relations, whereas an ontology also affords the definition and meta-relation of semantic relations themselves. (this definition is bad; make a better one someday)
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.
Organizational cartography is exactly what it sounds like: making maps of business entities, both internally and the external environment. The purpose of organizational cartography is to facilitate situation awareness, as well as ease the dissemination and uptake of policies, procedures, and corporate memory.
Organizational (institutional, corporate) memory is any data, information, or knowledge that an organization has to "remember" in order to function. In practice, it includes the amalgamation of information infrastructure that affords the people within the organization to access, maintain, and operationalize this memory.
OWL (Web Ontology Language) is a framework for expressing ontologies for automated reasoning applications. While not strictly subordinate to RDF, OWL has an incarnation as an RDF vocabulary, which is a superset of RDF Schema. In this form, OWL ontologies make it possible to express stipulations of cardinality on properties, term reconciliation and equivalencies between classes and properties, and a number of other desirable capabilities.
"Pace layers" is a conceptual framework advanced by the writer Stewart Brand, taking Duffy's concept of shearing layers and applying them to the societal scale.
Personal knowledge management (PKM) software is, in the most reductive sense, a tool for taking notes. However, these products are typically rudimentary knowledge graphs with dense hypermedia characteristics, and have powerful information organization and retrieval capabilities.
Principal is the name given to an identity for authentication purposes. A principal is the thing that makes contact with an authenticated information system. As such, it can represent an actual human, or an agent of that human (either another human or an automated system), or any other entity that requires access.
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.
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.
A search engine is a company (and concomitant website) that helps people find other websites.
SEO is the sacred cow of internet marketing. Nothing bad is to be said about SEO.
Self-hosting refers to running a computer program (almost always a network service) on hardware you control. Contrast with software-as-a-service (SaaS), where the vendor takes care of the hosting.
A semantic relation is a link between two entities that conveys a particular meaning. For example, the semantic relations available in this concept scheme are "has broader" and "has narrower"—which are inverses of each other—and "has related", which is symmetric, and can be interpreted as the inverse of itself.
The Semantic Web is an unrealized and likely unrealizable utopia of decentralized linked data systems with smart agents performing inferencing over information they find on the Web. It nevertheless boasts a raft of very useful technologies for everyday practical applications.
"Shearing layers" is a conceptual framework coined by the architect Frank Duffy to refer to aspects of a building which vary by orders of magnitude in their sensitivity to time.
A single source of truth is an idiom in information system design, whereby a single logical system is deemed authoritative over a set of information, and measures are taken to ensure this remains the case.
Situation awareness is the state of being aware of one's surroundings, and the positions and momenta (real or imaginary) of the dynamics of the salient entities within one's environment.
SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is an OWL ontology for representing concept schemes and/or thesauri, which are particular kinds of taxonomies.
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 argumentation is a form of (potentially collaborative) reasoning and persuasion that takes place in a formal system with a constrained repertoire of operations.
Structured data (in contrast to unstructured data) is a representation of information such that its content is machine-actionable by a deterministic process, i.e. it does not require interpretation by a human or by statistical means (i.e., artificial intelligence). The structure represented by a structured data object is of course a data structure (which would have a different representation inside a running program). An example of structured data (assuming some kind of schema to communicate the semantics) would be JSON.
The symbol management problem is roughly that of having too many symbols to manage: object keys, enumerated values, variables, class names, method names, URL path segments and query parameters, CSS selectors, etc.
A taxonomy is a flat, hierarchical (i.e., tree), set-theoretic, or graph-theoretic structure relating a set of categories to one another. Examples: the Linnaean Taxonomy relates categories of life form, NAICS relates categories of industry, and the Dewey Decimal System relates categories of books.
The then-what problem occurs in when you reach the boundary of a piece of software's capabilities. You put in all your information, you do some operations, and then what? What do you do with the results?
A thesaurus is a specific kind of concept scheme, insofar as it organizes terms (words and phrases), rather than concepts which need not necessarily be labeled.
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 flow is one discrete process undertaken by a user, mediated by a product, to achieve a particular goal.
A user interface is an interface that comes in direct contact with a human.
Vendor lock-in is the state of affairs in which the act of a customer investing in, and subsequent use of a vendor's proprietary commercial offerings, is the mechanism that drives up the switching cost. The customer then has no choice but to continue the economic relationship indefinitely, and do so on the vendor's terms.
A Web application is a software application which uses the World-Wide Web as a user interface. A Web application can be an entire website, or a cluster of Web resources embedded within a website, or even a single Web resource.
A Web Resource is any information on the World-Wide Web which is distinctly identifiable by an address, or Uniform Resource Identifier. A Web resource can take a variety of forms, including a conventional document file, a document fragment, or an interface to a software program.
A website can be understood in one aspect as a service, which runs on a server. In another aspect, it is an authoritative location—one of many locations on the World-Wide Web—for information resources, such as web pages and interfaces to software applications.
Wicked problems, a term coined by Horst Rittel, refer to a category of problems which are complex, dynamic, with multiple stakeholders, and often involve considerable trade-offs. The quintessential wicked problem is climate change.
Working in public is exactly what it sounds like: even if the act of working itself is not a literal public performance, the work in progress is made available for anybody to see. Working in public is the default mode of the open-source community, especially since the launch of the code-sharing platform, GitHub.
The World-Wide Web is a particular implementation of Hypermedia, which runs on top of the internet.