Glossary

API

Application Programming Interface, a set of data (often a library) specifying how software components should interact with each other. An API often includes specifications for routines, data structures, object classes, variables, and remote calls.

Ed-Fi

An open source data standard used to enable interoperability in the education market.

FERPA

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol; is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. HTTP defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.

Mapping

How a specific piece of data is organized and where it is located relative to other pieces of data in the software.

ODS

Operational Data Store

PowerSource

The PowerSchool online support website, a resource for PowerSchool users and administrators.

REST

Representational State Transfer, a software architectural style enabling the creation, reading, updating, and deletion of information on a server. REST uses HTTP calls, making it a simpler alternative to mechanisms such as SOAP, CORBA, and RPC. 

Resource

A collection of individual elements that describe a place, event, object, or concept. Resources can and often contain references to other resources that provide additional context.

Dependency

Dependency is a status a record can be held in. When a record is held in this status, it cannot be published because a required field is missing or a required record in a linked resource wasn’t published.

Database Trigger

A database trigger is functionality that tracks changes to certain tables (and the fields therein) and, upon data entry or edit, a publish (or republish) of linked resource records is automatically triggered.