1.1 Glossary

This document uses the following terms:

CDATA section: A section in an XML document that is bracketed by [!CDATA[ and ]] characters. All data in this section, including markup tags, is treated as normal characters by an XML parser.

child element: In an XML document, an element that is subordinate to and is contained by another element, which is referred to as the parent element.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): An application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems (text, graphic images, sound, video, and other multimedia files) on the World Wide Web.

in-memory: A memory model in which multidimensional aggregates are precomputed and stored but not written out on disk. Instead, they are stored in computer memory.

Persistent Storage: Nonvolatile storage mediums, such as magnetic disks, tapes, and optical disks.

primary key: A field or set of fields that uniquely identifies each record in a table. A primary key cannot contain a null value.

root element: The top-level element in an XML document. It contains all other elements and is not contained by any other element, as described in [XML].

serialization: A mechanism by which an application converts an object into an XML representation.

serialize: The process of taking an in-memory data structure, flat or otherwise, and turning it into a flat stream of bytes. See also marshal.

SOAP: A lightweight protocol for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. SOAP uses XML technologies to define an extensible messaging framework, which provides a message construct that can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols. The framework has been designed to be independent of any particular programming model and other implementation-specific semantics. SOAP 1.2 supersedes SOAP 1.1. See [SOAP1.2-1/2003].

SOAP envelope: A container for SOAP message information and the root element of a SOAP document. See [SOAP1.2-1/2007] section 5.1 for more information.

User Datagram Protocol (UDP): The connectionless protocol within TCP/IP that corresponds to the transport layer in the ISO/OSI reference model.

web service: A software entity that responds to SOAP messages ([SOAP1.1],.[WSDL]).

web service method: A procedure that is exposed to web service clients as an operation that can be called on the web service. Also referred to as web method.

XML: The Extensible Markup Language, as described in [XML1.0].

XML attribute: A name/value pair, separated by an equal sign (=) and included in a tagged element, that modifies features of an element. All XML attribute values are stored as strings enclosed in quotation marks.

XML document: A document object that is well formed, as described in [XML10/5], and might be valid. An XML document has a logical structure that is composed of declarations, elements, comments, character references, and processing instructions. It also has a physical structure that is composed of entities, starting with the root, or document, entity.

XML element: An XML structure that typically consists of a start tag, an end tag, and the information between those tags. Elements can have attributes and can contain other elements.

XML namespace: A collection of names that is used to identify elements, types, and attributes in XML documents identified in a URI reference [RFC3986]. A combination of XML namespace and local name allows XML documents to use elements, types, and attributes that have the same names but come from different sources. For more information, see [XMLNS-2ED].

XML schema: A description of a type of XML document that is typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, in addition to the basic syntax constraints that are imposed by XML itself. An XML schema provides a view of a document type at a relatively high level of abstraction.

MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.