A brief guide to the acronyms and abbreviations common in the IT world

The computer and software industries have spawned a bewildering amount of jargon and techspeak in the few decades of their existence. But just as the non-technical world has become used to some of the less mystifying terms and acronyms, new ones are rapidly coming into vogue.

Here is a brief guide to some of the main abbreviations and acronyms now current:

ADSL - Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. A service which makes it possible to send high volumes of data at high speeds across the existing copper cables of the telephone line.

There is also xDSL to describe various DSL technologies. ASP - Application Service Provider. A company providing IT services for users who do not want to run all their own IT activities. ASPs run enterprise software on their own computers; companies access this over a telecommunications network. ATM - Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A means of carrying data across networks so that capacity can be used efficiently; data packages are sent according to demand, without having to wait for specific time slots. Bluetooth -Ashort-range wireless connection standard. Its aim is to link a wide range of computer, electronics and telecoms devices. The technology uses a low power two-way radio link which is built into a microchip. CIT - Computer Integrated Telephony. The linking of telephone and IT systems to provide a seamless service to customers, whatever their means of contact. CRM - Customer Relationship Management. The use of software systems to target and serve customers by using data intelligently.

Products can be tailored to individual needs. EAI - Enterprise Application Integration. Integrating IT systems with new applications; a sophisticated approach to middleware. ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning. The linking of a company's various business operations and functions by means of complex software.

ERP is now being rapidly extended to the growing number of e-business applications being developed over the internet, connecting customer, supply chain and other activities. GSM - Global System for Mobile Communications. Common European standard for mobile telephones. JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group. A common graphics format for compressing still images. MP3 - MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) Audio Layer 3, a digital compression format for music files. PDA - Personal Digital Assistant. A portable organiser, increasingly with internet access and e-mail functions. SET - Secure Electronic Transaction. Automates the authorisation, verification fraud detection and settlement processes of credit card transactions over the internet. UMTS - Universal Mobile Telecommunications System. The next generation being planned after GSM. XML - Extensible markup language. Defines data suitable for processing rather than only publishing. It helps to make data meaningful so it can be used in a business process.

Data items, such as a customer account number, can carry definitions of themselves so that other applications can identify and process them.

This is an advance on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which is used to display text on the web. Wap - Wireless Application Protocol. Standard to enable mobile device users to view web pages easily. It is intended to simplify wireless access to e-mail and voice mail and enable transactions to be carried out. WML - Wireless Markup Language. Based on XML, this allows web sites to tailor the information format to fit the screen and limited capacity of mobile devices.

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