| Word | Description |
| Galileo | The EU global positioning system. Said to be a response to selective availability in the US GPS system. In 2008, the US and EU announced a cooperation agreement designed to allow civilian use of both signals with maximum positional accuracy. |
| GPS | Global Positioning System. Usually referring to the system of satellites constructed by the US Department of Defense to provide accurate positioning information for military and civilian purposes. |
| KML | KML (the Keyhole Markup Language) is now an OGC standard file format based on XML. The format is designed to provide presentation-style information for mapping software, such as Google Earth. |
| ODBC | Open DataBase Connectivity. A standard interface for accessing a variety of Database content. |
| Selective Availability (SA) | Selective Availability is a way that the US Government has to scramble certain portions of GPS positions to "fuzz" or render less accurate the locations obtained from the satellites. The intent of SA was to allow the US to decrease the accuracy for non-military applications during a time of war. The existence of SA has been a sufficient reason to cause the EU to create the Galileo system of global positioning satellites. SA was turned off by President George H W Bush during the first Iraq War in the early 1990s in order to allow the use of plentiful civilian GPS receivers for military applications. It was subsequently turned off by President William J Clinton on May 1, 2000 in a move to increase usefulness in the civilian sector. In 2007, President George W Bush removed the SA requirement from satellite procurement, thus effectively putting a permanent end to SA in the US system. |
| XML | The eXtensible Markup Language is a data formatting philosophy and method that provides backward- and forward-compatibility and excellent data exchange possibilities. Many file and data formats are based on XML, but each has its own definitions of meaning for every term in the file. However, XML's strict structural foundation makes it easy for software developers to support a wide variety of XML-based formats without having to reinvent the wheel each time. |