Glossary of Technical Terms

Because the audience of this information includes a large proportion of general business readers, the following definitions are provided for terms previously used in the technology overview.

A

• Active Server Pages (ASPX) – A kind of Web page with dynamic content, based on Microsoft .NET framework.
• ActiveX – Component Object Model (COM) related technologies that also involve Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). ActiveX is a Microsoft technology.
• ADO.NET – This term refers to ActiveX® Data Objects, a Microsoft technology that extends ActiveX.
• Authentication – The act of determining the identity of a requesting entity is known as authentication. It entails a process of accepting credentials from a user and validating those credentials against a designated authority. The user's (or potentially an application’s or computer's) identity is referred to as a security principal. The client must provide credentials to allow the server to verify the identity of the principal. After the identity is known, the application can authorize the principal to access resources on the system.
• Authorization – This is the process of determining whether the proven identity is allowed to access a specific resource.
• API or Application Programming Interface – A "package" of functions, messages, data structures, data types, and statements that allow different software programs to interact whether or not they were designed to do so.

L

• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) – A standard developed to allow applications to access directory information from other programs.

R

• RCM – Reinsurance Contract Management (RCM), in addition to being a generic term, is the specific name for the reinsurance contract management component of the SurSITE^® system.

S

• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)— A simple, XML-based messaging standard.
• SQL Server – Microsoft's proprietary object-oriented database product.

T

• TATE – This term refers to the Technical Accounting Transaction Engine (TATE), a component of the SurSITE^® system.

X

• XML – Extensible Markup Language. This is a system of "tagging" data to label it for manipulation. XML is compiled by referring to "schemas" or "document type definitions" that provide the compiling systems with tag meanings and related instructions. XML is a superset of HTML, the popular Web mark-up language, and a subset of the more complex SGML (Standardized General Mark-up Language).