Terminology Used in Anthracite and its Documentation
Process Chain - a sequence of connected objects starting with one or more sources
and ending in one or more results or export objects.
Object by Type eg, "Source Object" - objects are the components of process
chains. They may be Sources, Processors, Results, Reports or Exports.
Source - an object that provides data to a process
Process - an object that manipulates data passed to it
Results - an object that stores the output of objects
Export - an object that exports data to a files or database
Reports - an object that formats input data into templates
Tool - another way of referring to an Object
Regular Expression - a pattern matching language, useful for finding text in recurring formats even though the text may vary (eg, all phone numbers in the form (000) 000-0000,(800) 555-1212, (877) 555-5555, etc.
Connection / Upstream- & Downstream- : connections to, from or between
objects. A source that has a connection to a processor sends the Output of the
Source to the Input of the Processor, the Source is an Upstream connection of
the Processor, and the Processor is a Downstream Connection of the Source.
String - a sequence of characters, another way of referring to a chunk of text data. For example,
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
is a string of 43 characters, including 8 spaces.
Array - an array is a sequence of objects, often Strings. An Array of three Strings might be visualized like so:
{ apple, banana, carrot }
A two-dimensional spreadsheet of a tic-tac-toe table might be envisioned as
{ { ,X,O}, { ,O, }, {X, , } }
latest revision: 3/26/2003
latest revision: 2/5/2003