Glossary -- A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

NDLP Glossary - I

information

A non-specific term, used in this documentation as in normal English.

InQuery

InQuery is an information-retrieval system originally developed at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, a center funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and based at the University of Massachusetts. CIIR carries out basic research and technology transfer in the area of text-based information systems. In July 1996, a spin-off company, Sovereign Hill Software, Inc. was formed to market InQuery and related products.

Rather than an "off-the-shelf" package, InQuery is a collection of modules that can be used to build a customized system for creating indexes to bodies of text, searching the indexes, and retrieving the text and related materials (e.g. images indexed by textual bibliographic records).

InQuery is being used to index online materials at a number of government agencies and commercial organizations. At LC, InQuery is currently used to index textual materials and bibliographic records for the American Memory collections, legislative texts for THOMAS, the Handbook of Latin American Studies, and the Country Studies.

ISO

International Organization for Standardization, a worldwide non-governmental organization, established in 1947 to promote the development of standards to encourage trade and cooperative intellectual, scientific, and technological activity. Members of ISO are national standards organizations; the U.S. representative is ANSI (American National Standards Institute). Many ISO standards are developed and adopted at a national level or in a limited context before submission to ISO. For example, ASCII (a standard developed through ANSI for using 7 bits to code common characters) is the same as the International Reference Version of ISO 646.

[Don't expect to find the full text of most standards online. The main revenue for many standards organizations is from selling the standards in print (or possibly on CD-ROM) -- they have not worked out how to stay in business if they put them up for universal access.]

item

A non-specific term, used here as in normal English, a little more elegant than "thing." It may be used for physical or digital things.

ITU

International Telecommunications Union. The ITU is a United Nations agency based in Geneva, Switzerland. The ITU consists organizationally of five permanent organs: the General Secretariat, the International Frequency Registration Board (IFRB), the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR), the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) and the Telecommunications Development Bureau (BDT).

CCITT is the branch of ITU that deals with telephone standards, including fax. Group 3 and Group 4 fax standards incorporate compression algorithms that have been widely used (including at LC) for "lossless" compression of images.

Glossary -- A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

NDLP Documentation: About -- Start -- Index

NDLP Glossary - I

National Digital Library Program
Comments: caar@loc.gov (11/26/96)