The EGI Glossary
The EGI Community is composed by a large number of heterogeneous actors who contribute to providing or consuming services for e-Science. Policy makers produce policies and procedures that govern the EGI processes; dissemination experts write articles for communicating the progress and results in using or evolving EGI; researchers write papers on results achieved through the infrastructure; technology providers report on the advancement of technology components that enable EGI to operate and so on.
As the EGI community is large and distributed, working in structured groups or ad hoc collaborations, terms tend to assume different meanings in different contexts.
"Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment."--Learned Hand
In order to improve the communication across the EGI community, we decided to define a common EGI glossary which plays the important role of defining the meaning of a set of terms that are relevant across various functional areas of the community. The initiative started around a year ago with the creation of the EGI Glossary Coordination Group to define and maintain the glossary on behalf of the community.
Today, the first version of the EGI glossary has been finally approved. This first version includes and harmonises terms that have been in use across various groups. The terms have been aligned with external glossaries where possible (e.g.,ITIL 2011 Glossary).
We invite all people to consult the glossary and use the terms accordingly when communicating within the community.
