Page 70 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Glossary

Electronic Government Government’s use of technology, particularly Web-based applications, to
enhance the access to and delivery of government information and
services to citizens, business partners, employees, other agencies, and
government entities.

Encryption Cryptographic transformation of data (called “plaintext”) into a form
(called “ciphertext”) that conceals the data’s original meaning to prevent it
from being known or used.

Enterprise Architecture An institutional systems blueprint that defines in both business and
technology terms an organization’s current and target operating
environments and provides a road map for moving between the two.

Extensible Markup A flexible, nonproprietary set of standards for tagging information so that
Language (XML) it can be transmitted using Internet protocols and readily interpreted by
disparate computer systems.

Extensible Stylesheet A language used to transform XML-based data into HTML or other
Language (XSL) presentation formats for display in a variety of media.

Hypertext Markup The standard markup language used to display information on the Web. It
Language (HTML) uses tags embedded in text files to encode instructions for formatting and
displaying the information.

Interoperability The ability of two or more systems or components to exchange
information and to use the information that has been exchanged.

Markup The addition of tags or labels to data elements in a document to provide
processing instructions or to indicate structure or meaning.

Metadata Data containing descriptive information about other data. For example, a
block of numerical data might be identified in metadata as representing
unit cost in dollars.

Page 66 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government