Reference

Actionscript

Actionscript is the programming language used by Flash. It is currently on version 3.

Alpha version

In the software development life-cycle an Alpha version is the first working version of something. It is usually untested and contains bugs.

API

An Application Programming Interface (API) allows a computer to access the services provided by a web application. One website sends a request to another website for a certain type of information. A common example of this might be a website saying to Flickr ‘send me 10 photos of lighthouses. Flickr will then look through its photos and send back links to 10 pictures of lighthouses. The website that sent the request can then chose how to display that information. Here’s the Flickr API in action: http://www.qflick.com/index.php?type=text&q=lighthouse

Atom

Atom is a type of feed that was intended to replace RSS. It is more flexible and allows more information to be conveyed.

BBC Metadata Services API

The BBC Metadata Services API returns structured information about a supplied piece of text, URL or postcode. It can be used for all sorts of things, from tagging content to mashing up existing feeds.

Beta version

In the software development life-cycle a Beta version is the second working version of something. It has been tested and some bugs have been ironed out. Beta versions are often released to the web community and in this way the community itself does a great deal of the testing.

DBpedia

Dbpedia is a database version of Wikipedia. It takes advantage of structured data such as category information, titles, abstracts and links to make the information in Wikipedia more useful. It's used in a lot of projects for a wide range of different reasons. At the BBC we are using it largely as a controlled vocabulary for tagging content - this way we can make sure the we don't have different sets of tags for 'aeroplane', 'airplane' and 'aircraft' (which would make our tags less useful). It also avoids confusion between Turkey (Republic of) and Turkey (bird).

Feed

A feed is simply a type of webpage that contains frequently updated content. It is usually in a format such as RSS or Atom which allows other web services to easily access the information it contains. For example, BBC news feeds allow you to get the latest news stories from the BBC delivered to your desktop or homepage via a feed-reader. In reality, feeds do not deliver anything in the way email does – the feed reader just checks the page regularly to see if anything has changed.

Feed reader

A feed reader is a piece of software that regularly checks feeds and notifies you if there are any recent changes. They are used to subscribe to blogs or keep up to date with news. Feed readers can be either downloadable programmes such as Feed Reader or widgets such as Google Reader that can be included on a webpage.

Flash

Flash is a plug-in that allows much more complex animation and interaction than is usually possible on a web page. Flash is also used to integrate video in web pages, a good example being www.youtube.com. Flash files have a .swf file extension.

Flash Authoring tool

The software, created by Adobe, that is used to create Flash files.

Flickr

Flickr allows users to share their photographs with each other. It currently has billions of photos available for free which you can search, and they tend to be of higher quality than those found on Google images. This can be extremely useful for teaching anything from biology to geography. Flickr is also famous for its API which allows you to easily access Flickr images for use in other tools. Earth Album is a good example of this; it’s a cross between Google Maps and Flickr.

Google Docs

Google provides free online office tools with its Gmail accounts which allow users to create documents online and share them with others. They also allow multiple people to edit the same document at once and keep track of changes over time.

Javascript

Javascript is a scripting language that allows webpages to have simple user interaction and animations without using Flash. It's used for pop-ups, alerts and collapsible widgets.

Jquery

Jquery is a Javascript library which makes it much easier to add animations, galleries and other features to web pages.

Mashup

A mashup is a combination of two or more existing web services, usually created using their APIs. Netvibes is an example of a mashup that combines lots of websites and creates a single place that users can go to access lots of news stories, applications and services all at once.

Open Source

Open Source is an approach to software and hardware development where everything is opened up to the public and individuals are encouraged to contribute to the code/design/editorial content.

Firefox (a web browser) is a good example of a piece of software developed in this way.

You can read more about Open Source at Wikipedia and the Open Source Initative (OSI).

Papervision 3d

Papervision3d is an open source set of scripts which extend the functionality of the Flash Player and allow it to display 3d objects in the browser.

Parse

Parsing describes the method by which a computer programme sequentially analyses a document. Substitute 'read' and it will make more sense.

PHP

PHP is a programming language used to generate web pages. It is generally used on sites that are very large, change very regularly or allow users a high degree of customisation.

Plug-in

A plug-in is a piece of software that, when installed, enables the web browser to perform additional functionality such as watch video or view animations.

RSS

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a type of web-feed. It is usually used to publish a list of recent changes to a website, such as new news stories or blog entries. RSS is a form of XML that has specific rules about what can and can’t be included and how. This makes the information easy for computer programmes and web services to read and makes it possible for you to subscribe to blogs, for example.

Scrape

Scraping refers to extracting information that is available on the web but not provided in an easy-to-read format such as XML. For example, someone might write a piece of software that extracts all the links from a certain page or directory. Spammers regularly use this technique to search the internet for email addresses which they can later sell.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking refers to sharing your web bookmarks or recommendations for websites. The two most famous examples are probably del.icio.us – which provides a public online space for you to store your bookmarks – and Digg – which focuses more on using user recommendations to suggest trendy topics and breaking news. del.icio.us in particular is an extremely useful way of finding sites that someone else has already done the hard work of collecting. For example, you can search for ‘KS2 Maths’ and see how many people have bookmarked each site.

Social Networking

Social networking refers to any site such as Bebo, Facebook or MySpace which incorporates listing, linking to and following your friends online.

Tweener class

Tweener is an Open Source actionscript Library for Flash which alows developers to animate with maths rather that frame by frame in the timeline

Twitter

Twitter is one of the most recent successful social networking services. It allows you to publish very short messages or ‘tweets’ to the internet. It is sometimes referred to as a micro-blog because it’s a web-based log of your thoughts. Twitter allows you to follow other users so that you can automatically find out what they have to say by visiting your Twitter homepage. People follow their friends, celebrities and colleagues, or just people they find interesting. Because messages are so short, you can send and receive ‘tweets’ as text-messages. This has led to Twitter becoming a source of breaking news, especially in emergency situations such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Some people have become very keen on Twitter and use it as a way of spreading their ideas – you are what you tweet, so they say. It should be used with care though, as everything you say is public and pretty hard to get rid of.

Web application

A web application is any piece of software that delivers its functionality via the internet. While software such as word processors are usually installed on your computer, web services are installed on someone else’s computer and you access them through your browser. The most common example of this is a search-engine.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a very general term that is used to refer to a number of trends that have emerged on the internet in the last few years. The term is generally used to refer to websites that contain a large amount of user-generated content (such as Youtube or Myspace), encourage networking and sharing of information (such as Facebook or Delicious), make it easy for other sites to access their content and services (such as Google and Flickr) and encourage collaboration (such as Wikipedia).

Widget

A widget is a small piece of code that can be embedded on a webpage to provide some sort of additional functionality. iGoogle and Netvibes use various widgets and allow users to choose which widgets they want to display. Widgets can provide anything from a news feed a clock or a pair of eyes that follow your cursor around the screen.

Wiki

A wiki is a web page or website in which the content can be easily edited by users. Some wikis are open to the general public (such as Wikipedia) while others are more restricted – such as wikis that are only available through a school intranet. Wikis are an excellent way of managing collaborative projects and sharing information because they provide a single space to store and update text and images. It is generally also possible to see who has added what to a wiki by looking at the page history.

You can start your own wiki for free and it only takes a few minutes. Wikipedia offers a comparison of various wiki providers or you can just search for ‘free wiki’.

Wikipedia

With over 12 million encyclopaedic articles (nearly 3 million in English), Wikipedia is one of the largest and most successful Web 2.0 projects. It is created almost entirely by volunteers and allows all users to add, edit and even delete entries. Most articles can be edited by anyone without even logging in, which makes correcting or adding to articles very easy. Although this has been the key to its success it has also caused several notable controversies. Nevertheless, a 2005 study by leading science journal Nature found Wikipedia to be about as accurate on science subjects as Britannica, the leading traditional encyclopaedia.

XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a way of presenting information so that a computer can easily understand it. It is vital to Web 2.0 as it allows information to be shared easily between different websites and services. Most modern web pages are written in a type of XML called XHTML which contains text and images and instructions for a computer about how they should be displayed. For example, if you want to have a large heading on a webpage that says “Welcome Backstage” you could write <h1>Welcome Backstage</h1>. The <h1> tags either side tell the computer that the text between the tags is a ‘Heading 1’ – the largest heading. Alternatively, <i>Welcome Backstage</i> would tell the computer to make the text italic. Other forms of XML use different tags to show the meaning of a particular piece of text, like <title>, <link> and <description>.

Yahoo Local API

This API allows the user to input place names. The API matches those place names to those in a large Yahoo database and when a match is found the longitude and latitude coordinates of that location are returned to the user. It is a very useful geo-location tool. Visit the Yahoo website for more details http://developer.yahoo.com/search/local/V3/localSearch.html