Terms and Acronyms

The following table describes common industry terms and acronyms. Many of these are used in references provided on this site.

TermDefinition
AMIAdvanced Metering Initiative
AMRAutomated Meter Reading
APIApplication Programming Interface
BAMBusiness Activity Monitoring
BIBusiness Intelligence
BPABusiness Process Analysis
BPELBusiness Process Execution Language, same as BPEL4WS
BPEL4WSBusiness Process Execution Language for Web Services, a formal subset of BPML
BPMBusiness Process Management
BPMLBusiness Process Markup Language
BREBusiness Rule Engine
CIMCommon Information Model
CISCustomer Information System
CRMCustomer Relationship Management
DRDemand Response
DRXDemand Response Exchange
EAIEnterprise Application Integration
EDAEvent Driven Architecture
EMSEnergy Management System
ERPEnterprise Resource Planning
ESBEnterprise Service Bus
ETLExtraction, transformation and loading
IAIntelligent Agent, a software component used to make local decisions
IECInternational Electrotechnical Commission, a standards organization
JMSJava Messaging System, a Java-based API used for messaging interfaces
MDAModel Driven Architecture
MultiSpeakAn integration standard sponsored by NRECA
OntologyAn explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts, and other entities
that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them.
OWLWeb Ontology Language
RDFXML Resource Descriptor Format
RSOAReal-Time SOA, where an SOA is extended with support for reliable, high performance publish subscribe and events
RTEReal-Time Enterprise
SOAService Oriented Architecture
UMLUnified Modeling Language
W3CWorld Wide Web Consortium, a standards organization
WFWorkflow
WorkflowAn IT technology which uses electronic systems to manage and monitor business processes
WSWeb Services, used as a prefix for many W3C recommendations
WSDLWeb Services Definition Language, an XML dialect used to define web service interfaces
XMIXML Metadata Interchange
XMLExtensible Markup Language
XSDXML Schema