Glossary
No resource would be complete without a comprehensive glossary of terms. We’ve compiled a list of terms and their definitions to better help you navigate.
2005 GTIN Sunrise An industry-wide initiative of North American retailers and trading partners to upgrade their bar code scanning and processing systems to support the new 14-digit GTIN by January 1, 2005
A2A Application-to-application integration is a euphemism for enterprise application integration.Two or more applications, usually but not exclusively within the same organization, are linked at an intimate message or data level.
Acknowledgement In contrast to the notification function, the acknowledgement is a response to a command (e.g., add, change) returned to the originator of the command. Every command needs a response and is handled according to the agreement between the parties involved (e.g., source data pool, final recipient exchange). In the interoperable network, acknowledgement messages are standardised and may contain the following information: Confirmation of message receipt, Success/failure of processing (syntax and content) and Reason for failure, with a code assigned to each failure.
AES Advanced Encryption Standard is a new Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) that specifies an encryption algorithm(s) capable of protecting sensitive government information well into the twentyfirst century. The U.S. Government will use this algorithm and the private sector will use it on a voluntary basis.
Algorithm A clearly specified mathematical computation process; a set of rules that gives a prescribed result.
ANSI X.509 Public key cryptography The ITU-T (International Telecommunications Union-T) standard for certificates. X.509 v3 refers to certificates containing or capable of containing extensions.
API Application Program Interface is a popular element of programs that enable inter-program communications.
APPC Advanced Program-to-Program Communication is IBM's program-to-program communication, distributed transaction processing and remote data access protocol suite across the IBM software product line.
AS1 Applicability Statement 1 - an international standard for EDI over the Internet where the transport protocol is Simple Mail Transport Protocol. Limited market acceptance since SMTP is lossy, so neither party really knows that the message was delivered. Advantage is that most firewall and enterprise security procedures do not need to change.
AS2 Applicability Statement 2 - an international standard for EDI over the Internet where the transport protocol is the HyperText Transport Protocol. Gaining market acceptance since confirmed delivery is required for http service. Disadvantage is that most firewall and enterprise security procedures need to be changed.
ASP Application Service Providers operated data centers and high speed Internet connections with a business model purporting to rent business applications on a time-sharing or monthly rental basis over the Internet. Assumed that large-enterprise applications for ERP, SFA or CRM could be partitioned cost-effectively for usage-based fees and that customers would rather rent than run their own SAP/Oracle/Siebel system, or if they were a small business, just buy the small/mid-sized business application. Customer demand never materialized, so VC investments backing these companies dried up by the end of 2000.
Asymmetric encryption An algorithm that uses two mathematically related, yet different key values to encrypt and decrypt data. One value is designated as the private key and is kept secret by the owner. The other value is designated as the public key and is shared with the owner's trading partners. The two keys are related such that when one key is used to encrypt data, the other key must be used for decryption. See public key and private key.
Async Asynchronous communications is a form of communication by which two applications communicate independently, without requiring both to be simultaneous available for communications. A process sends a request and may or may not be idle while waiting for a response. It is a popular non-blocking communications style. Most popular data communications protocols (IP, ATM, Frame Relay, etc) rely on asynchronous methods.
Authentication The verification of the source (identity), uniqueness, and integrity (unaltered contents) of a message.
Authorization The final recipient communicates with the data source, expressing intent to regularly integrate new information into its back-end system ("agreement to synchronise"). For case items, it expresses the intent to trade the item. Note: Authorization works on the basis of GTIN level and GLN of information provider and target market and is sent once for each GTIN.
B2B Business-to-Business refers to electronic commerce conducted between companies and almost exclusively involves system-to-system interactions. In contrast, business-to-consumer is typically system-person interactions. B2B includes products, services and systems such as eMarketplaces, supply chains and EDI products and services.
