Computer Terminology/Glossary D-E-F

Data controller: Those who are responsible for processing 'personal data', information that is held about an identifiable living person. See also 'Data subject', an associated legal term.

Data grid: 

Data integration: A computational process enabling the linking together of different datasets.

Data mining: A set of procedures such as clustering and pattern recognition algorithms that search large datasets for patterns. It is usually atheoretical, using unsupervised learning and identifying patterns in data and summarising them without reference to a conceptual or theoretical organising framework.

Data poisoning: Providing wrong or misleading information. A main type is subject fraud, especially where a survey instrument is forwarded to individuals outside the intended sample.

Data subject: Those who are subject of personal data and enjoy specified rights in respect of such data. See also 'Data Controller'.

Digital curation: Preparation of data in ‘future proof’ formats, assigning permanent identifiers to documents and ‘mirroring’ archives across multiple sites. 

Digital Rights Management: Professional and legal regulation of legitimate access to, and use of, digital resources.

Digital trace: Indicator of human activity created in the course of online interaction, e.g., patterns of search behaviour apparent from web log files (see 'web log file').

Documentality: Extent to which the data used in a research study are recorded and available post hoc, ideally including a description of the research design and how data collection proceeded in practice as well as the characteristics of the data.

Drop-out: Withdrawal of research subjects from participation in an online research study, especially Internet surveys.

Edge: An undirected relationship between nodes in a network.  

Emoticon: A figurative representation formed only by using characters available on a QWERTY keyboard. The most common is the 'smiley' [ :-)] , which celebrated its twenty fifth birthday in late 2007.

Encryption: Procedures for coding data in transit so that only those authorised with rights to see and use the data may do so.

End User License: Conditions and rights associated with the use of online datasets and other resources.

Entertainment poll: Surveys conducted for their amusement value. These have proliferated on the Internet, where they largely consist of websites where any visitor can respond to a posted survey. As unscientific as are telephone call-in polls.

e-Social Science: A range of computational resources and procedures using Grid and High Performance Computing to facilitate social science research, comprising the Access Grid (support for using online video teleconferencing), Computational Grid (support for computation of very large and/or complex requirements) and Data Grid (support for discovery, collation and transfer of distributed datasets). In natural science, the equivalent term is 'e-Science'. The term 'e-Research' is also in use as a generic alternative to subject-specific terminology. In the US, the term in use is 'cyber-research'. These terms are also used to identify policies and programmes promoted by research funding organisations such as the US National Science Foundation and the UK Research Councils. See also 'Grid'.

Expert systems: A sub-field of ‘artificial intelligence’ (see separate entry) that attempts to enable computers to perform a task as well as human experts by using an ‘ontology’ (see separate entry) for a substantive domain to reason about it.

Extensible Mark-up Language (‘XML’): A flexible text format that is used for data exchange. This general purpose markup language is designed to be readable by humans while also providing metadata tags for content that can be easily recognised by computers.

File Transfer Protocol: A protocol enabling computers and servers to transmit data across networks.

Firewall: A means of providing security of Internet user accounts. There are both hardware and software firewalls. None are 100% effective against hackers (those seeking illegitimate access to users' accounts).

Folksonomy: Also called ‘collaborative tagging’ or ‘social tagging’. The practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used rather than a controlled vocabulary.
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