Business Data Catalog: Glossary

This glossary defines terms commonly used with the Business Data Catalog.

Terms

Term	Definition
access control list (ACL)	A list of permissions granted to users or groups for file and network resource access.
association	An association between two related entities that describes the navigation between them. For example, a Customer entity might have zero or more Order entities. Each Order entity is associated with the Customer entity that represents the customer who placed the order.
authentication	In a multi-user or network operating system, the process by which the system validates a user's logon credentials.
authorization	The permissions that an administrator or a user with Manage Permissions rights grants to Microsoft Windows users and groups to use a system and the data stored on the system.
entity instance	The business objects, for example, customer #88697 and order #1000 in the line-of-business (LOB) application. If your entity maps to a table, you can think of entity instances as rows.
entity	A data object that represents a person, place, or thing in Business Data Catalog solutions. Commonly used entities could be objects such as Customer, Order, or Invoice.
Front-end Web Server	An Office SharePoint Server 2007 front-end Web server.
line-of-business (LOB) application	A critical computer application that runs in an enterprise, such as accounting, supply chain management, or a resource planning application.
metadata	Data about data. In the Business Data Catalog, metadata describes entities: how to obtain instance information, relationships to other entities, and actions you can execute for an entity.
metadata package	In the Business Data Catalog, an XML file containing the metadata for a line-of business (LOB) system.
metadata repository	The Shared Services Provider (SSP) database in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 server farm that hosts metadata for one or more Business Data Catalog solutions.
picker	A user control in Office SharePoint Server 2007 that allows you to pick entity instances from the user interface. Most of the Business Data features, such as Business Data Web Parts, have pickers integrated with them so you can browse the available entity instances and pick the instances you want in your application.
schema	Represents the type of data that you are representing in the Business Data Catalog. For example, the schema of the metadata XML is represented as an XSD.
Search Center	A page within an Office SharePoint Server 2007 user interface that allows users to search data. The Search Center offers a customizable and extensible object model.
Shared Service	A service provided by an SSP to a logical grouping of Web applications and their associated sites.
Shared Services Provider (SSP)	A Shared Services Provider (SSP) provides a common set of services and service data to a logical grouping of Web applications and their associated sites.
single sign-on (SSO)	A service that enables single sign-on to end users for enterprise application integration solutions. The SSO service maps Microsoft Windows accounts to back-end credentials. SSO makes it possible for users to access back-end systems and applications by logging on only once to the Windows network. Microsoft Single Sign-On service (SSOSrv) provides storage and mapping of credentials, such as account names and passwords, so portal-based applications can retrieve information from third-party systems.
XML Web service	The fundamental building block in the move to distributed computing on the Internet. XML Web services expose useful functionality to Web users through a standard Web protocol, usually SOAP. Web services provide a way to describe their interfaces in enough detail to allow a user to build a client application to communicate with them. This description is usually contained in an XML file called a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document.