Computer Terminology/Glossary G-H-I

Geographical Information System: Software handling geographical information and its visual representation. See also ‘raster data’ and ‘vector data’.

Granularity: The fineness or coarseness of the detail available from a given data source.

Grid: A distributed computing infrastructure that combines parallel and distributed computer platforms to enable computational operations exceeding the capacities of individual desktop computers.

Grid-enabling: Adapting a dataset to make it accessible programmatically over the Grid.

Harvested e-mail: Sets of e-mail addresses collected from postings on the Web and from individuals knowingly or not knowingly solicited for their e-mail address.

Head-mounted Display (‘HMD’): An immersive VRE in which the environment is displayed in 3D glasses.  

Human-Computer Interaction (‘HCI’): A field of social and behavioural science concerned with the ways that people apply and relate to computer technologies.

Human Subjects Model (also called ‘Human Subjects Research Model’): A model of ethical guidelines developed in reaction against scientific practice in Nazi Germany. Its key elements are the protection of confidentiality, anonymity and the use of informed consent.

Hyperlink: A user-assigned or automatically generated connection between two or more points on online documents or other online artefacts.

Hypertext: An unstructured series of pages and links between pages in a network.

Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML): A standard for marking up documents containing text and multimedia objects and linking those documents with hypertext links. Initial basis of the World Wide Web.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): A text-based protocol that is commonly used for transferring information across the Internet.

HTTP Tunneling: A procedure enabling individuals to reach through a corporate firewall via a proxy server. Illegal in some cases.

Institutional Review Board: A body charged with determining that the potential risks to research subjects are outweighed by the potential benefits of the research. Also called 'ethics committees' and 'research ethics committees'.

Intellectual Property Rights: The rights in law that the creator of a document, composition, performance, invention or other valued innovation, enjoys over its licensed and legitimate use.

Intelligent agent: A software program possessing some form of ‘artificial intelligence’ (see separate entry) sufficient to sense changes in a complex environment and act on those changes to achieve goals on behalf of users.

Intercept survey: Pop-up surveys that often use systematic sampling for every kth visitor to a website or web page.

Interoperability: Procedures and computer programs enabling the linking of datasets to facilitate analytic inquiries that cannot be satisfied by reference to a single dataset. Involves the assignment of ‘metadata’ tags to archived data.

IP Address (Internet Protocol Address): The 'address' is the identifying number of the computer from which a given Internet transaction has taken place. Internet Service Providers may assign addresses 'dynamically' so that two sessions from the same machine show different numbers.

Internet Relay Chat: An instant messaging protocol for online communication.
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