Glossary
CBS Commission for Basic Systems
ET Expert Team
ETDR&C Expert Team on Data Representation and Codes
HTML Hypertext Markup Language the lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the World Wide Web. It is a non-proprietary format based upon SGML. However it was never precisely defined, and this allowed many software suppliers to add functionality at whim. This forced browsers to have to recognise these different add-ons, giving rise to inter-operability problems and eventual stalemate.

HTTP

Hypertext Transport Protocol is a data access protocol currently run over TCP and is the basis of the World-Wide Web
ISO International Standards Organisation.

There are very many standards which impinge on meteorology and there are 35 metadata standards of which ISO/DIS 19115 is the Geographic standard.
Java Java, a language of the C++ family developed by Sun as an open language for software to run across multiple platforms.
Markup Historically, the word markup has been used to describe annotation or other marks within a text intended to instruct a compositor or typist how a particular passage should be printed or laid out. Examples include wavy underlining to indicate boldface, special symbols for passages to be omitted or printed in a particular font and so forth. As the formatting and printing of texts was automated, the term was extended to cover all sorts of special markup codes inserted into electronic texts to govern formatting, printing, or other processing
Metadata Metadata or "data about data" describe the content, quality, condition, location and other characteristics of data. The term is normally understood to mean structured data about digital (and non-digital) resources that can be used to help support a range of operations and functions. These might include, for example, resource description and discovery, the management of information resources (including rights management) and their long-term preservation.
OML Weather Observation Definition Format US Navy SYNOP/METAR etc definition format for distribution to USN Ships.

OS

Operating system The interface between programs and the hardware.
SGML Standard Generalised Markup Language is an international standard for the description of marked-up electronic text. It is a meta-language, that is, a means of formally describing a language, in this case, a markup language.
SVG Scalar Vector Graphics is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML. SVG allows for three types of graphic objects: vector graphic shapes, images and text. Graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and incorporated into previously rendered objects. SVG drawings can be dynamic and interactive.
URI Uniform Resource Identifier. The generic set of all names/addresses that are short strings that refer to resources.
URL Uniform Resource Locator. An informal term (no longer used in technical specifications) associated with popular URI schemes: http, ftp, mailto, etc.

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium The standards organisation developing XML and much of the rest of the alphabet soup.

WMO

World Meteorological Organization

WWW

World Weather Watch
XInclude XInclude is a processing model and syntax for general-purpose inclusion. Inclusion allows merging a number of XML information sets into a single composite Infoset. It is the way to break XML documents into modules.

XML

EXtensible Markup Language a standard format for structured documents and data on the Web. Structured data includes things like spreadsheets, address books, configuration parameters, financial transactions, and technical drawings. "document" is now taken to be a generalised name for data and documents. It is a derivation and simplification of SGML. XML looks a bit like HTML, but it is not a replacement for HTML. XML is verbose by design, and is intended to be read by an application, not a human in further processing and manipulating the document.
XMLSchema XMLSchema Define the vocabulary and syntax of an XML document. It is a replacement for the DTD, and it has considerably greater flexibility of definition, datatypes than DTD. Since it is also written in XML it can be processed like any other XML document.
XSLT eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. It is designed for use as part of XSL, which is a stylesheet language for XML. In addition to XSLT, XSL includes an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting. XSL specifies the styling of an XML document by using XSLT to describe how the document is transformed into another XML document that uses the formatting vocabulary.