| AAROC |
Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre - supporting initiative |
| AOSP |
African Open Science Platform - recent Open Science inititative supported by the South African Academy of Sciences |
| API |
Application Programming Interface - typically a means for expressing the means for interacting with a remote service or application |
| ASREN |
Arab States Regional Network |
| AVN |
African Very long baseline interferometry Network. A network of radio telescopes in Africa |
| Bootcamp |
A brief, focussed event with a development focus around a particular issue or technology. Particularly suited to creating an initial spike in activity or completing a project activity or application |
| CERN |
European Centre for Particle Physics |
| CHAIN |
Co-Ordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures. FP-7 project. |
| CHAIN-REDS |
Co-Ordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures for Research, Education and Data Sharing. FP-7 project, follow-on to CHAIN |
| COTS |
Cheap Off-The-Shelf - referring to commodity components |
| CRIS |
Current Research Information System |
| DARIAH |
Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities - community of practice |
| DevOps |
Portmanteau of "Development" and "Operations" , referring to a collaborative engineering and development culture |
| e-IRG |
e-Infrasructures Reflection Group. See http://www.e-irg.org |
| eduGAIN |
The worldwide inter-federation run by GEANT. See http://www.edugain.org |
| EGI, EGI.eu |
The EGI foundation coordinates distributed grid and cloud computing in Europe |
| FAIR |
Acronym pertaining to data : Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable |
| GARR |
The Italian National Research Network |
| GrIDP |
A catch-all identity federation for new identity providers, operated by GARR. See gridp.garr.it |
| ICRI |
International Conference on Research Infrastructures. Annual conference on research infrastructures. The 2016 edition was hosted by the South African Department of Science and Technology in Cape Town |
| IdP |
Identity Provider - in an Identity Federation, the service which authenticates a user's identity |
| IDPOpen |
A catch-all identity provider for users with no identity providers, operated by GARR. See idpopen.garr.it |
| iGRID |
Smart Grid Capacity Development and Enhancement - community of practice |
| Indigo DataCloud |
H2020 project aimed at developing datacentre solutions for research clouds |
| ISP |
Internet Service Provider - internet terminology |
| MURIA |
Medicines Utilisation Research In Africa - community of practice |
| NREN |
National Research and Education Network |
| OAI-PMH |
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. A means to data interoperability |
| OLA |
Operating Level Agreement |
| OpenAIRE |
Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe. Series of data and scholarly communicatin interoperability projects funded by the European Commission |
| OSP |
Open Science Platform - a proposal for an open platform for Open Science workflows. See www.sci-gaia.eu/osp |
| R & E |
Research and Education |
| RDA |
Research Data Alliance. See https://www.rd-alliance.org/ |
| REST |
Representational State Transfer - a standard vocabulary for interacting with remote services |
| SBN |
Serengeti Broadband Network (SBN) - Innovative broadband networking project under the TTA. See https://www.ttaportal.org/serengeti-broadband-network |
| Science DMZ |
Demilitarsed Zone for Science - network model optimised for efficient processing and transfer of data |
| SEACOM |
Southern African marine cable system, and private network services provider |
| Slack |
A modern messaging system for teams. See slack.com |
| TACC |
Texas Advanced Computing Centre |
| THOR |
A H2020 project - Technical and Human infrastructure for Open Research |
| TTA |
Technology Transfer Alliance. See https://www.ttaportal.org |
| Ubuntunet Alliance |
The Regional NREN of East and Southern Africa |
| VPN |
Virtual Private Network - network technology |
| WACREN |
West and Central African Regional Network |
| WACS |
West African Cable System. West-African marine cable system connecting the U.K. with South Africa, with several landing points between |
| walled garden |
Also known as "closed platform". Referred to online community platforms or social networks. See description in Wikipedia |
| WIMEA-ICT |
Weather Information Management in East Africa - research community |