Multimedia Glossary: I

IAB

Internet Architecture Board

The IAB is a governing body for The Internet. It handles administrative aspects of the Net, and manages standards and contracts. The IAB is appointed by the ISOC, looking at the long-term strategic planing of the internet. This involves standardization of protocols, management of interoperatability with all the countries of the world, supervision of the physical network, analysis of user patterns.

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IANA

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

IANA falls under the IAB and assigns new IP addresses, i.e. the numbers (such as 197.65.98.18). Domain names are handled by different bodies in different countries. For the USA domain names are handled by InterNIC.

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ICC

International Color Consortium

The ICC was established in 1993 to address the color problems on different platforms, such as that the same color hue was displayed differently. One of their proposed solutions was the sRGB system.

ICMP

Internet Control Message Protocol

ICMP is defined by RFC792 and RFC950. This protocol is used by routers and hosts to send control information or error messages to other routers or hosts. As web author you do not need to worry about these. As internet network administrator you definitely need to understand this. ICMP is used, for example, to check whether a host is available. It thus functions like ping.

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IEEE

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

The IEEE (eye-triple-e) is a non-profit, technical professional association for electrical and electronic engineers. The IEEE oversees technical publications and consensus-based standards activities

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IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force

The IETF falls under the IAB and looks after the technical standards of the Net. The used to specify HTML standards, which is now done by the W3C.

The IETF look after internet services, integration, routing, transport, services, applications of the internet.

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Indexed color

See Color map / color palette

INRIA

Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique

INRIA (based in France) inherited the World Wide Web project from CERN (where the WWW originated) and ran the W3C together with MIT (Michigan Institute of Technology) and Keio University (Japan).

Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique

See INRIA

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

See IEEE

Integrated Services Digital Network

See ISDN

Intensity

Intensity is also known as chroma or saturation. See chroma for a detailed explanation

Interlacing

Interlacing is method used to accommodate long waits on a busy network. This method makes it possible to load an image in spurs of small bits bits scattered from all over the image. The image starts displaying hazy or fuzzy, and as loading proceeds, it becomes clearer and clearer. It is possible to stop receiving further data of the image from the server once the viewer decides he/she does not need to see the complete image.

International Color Consortium

See ICC

International Standards Organization

See ISO

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Internet Architecture Board

See IAB

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

See IANA

Internet Control Message Protocol

See ICMP

Internet Engineering Task Force

See IETF

Internet Protocol

See IP

Internet Service Provider

See ISP

Internet Society

See ISOC

InterNIC

Internet Network Information Center

InterNIC is jointly owned by three companies (AT&T, Network Solutions Inc, and General Atomics) contracted to the NSF (National Science Foundation) of the USA. InterNIC handles the daily running of the internet by assigning IP addresses, managing domain name hierarchies, managing routing information for backbones, monitoring the growth of the internet, and distributing information about the internet. InterNIC assigns domain names to IP addresses on application. In countries other than the USA there are other bodies handling the domain names.

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IP

Internet Protocol

IP is defined by RFC791 and RFC1349.

IP provides a datagram service between hosts on a TCP/IP network - IP thus runs "on top of" TCP. It routes the packets of data that are transmitted to the correct host. IP also takes apart datagrams and puts them back together again.

The IP (i.e. IPv4) address of a device is a hierarchical and numerical 32-bit address such as 123.143.221.225 (with numbers ranging from 0-255 in each block). IPv6 is a 128-bit system, permitting many more IP addresses than IPv4.

Older server architecture allowed only one IP address per box, which meant that you needed a different server for each IP address. Soon "virtual boxes" aliasing was possible allowing more than one IP address to be on the smae box, and allowing each such IP to alias to a different domain name.

IP is connectionless (thus not guaranteed). But when used together with TCP, error control is handled, and as TCP does that, IP does not need to bother about it.

An IP address is a software address assigned by a network administrator. For the internet IP addresses are officially allocated by approved domain administrators. Commercial internet connection companies (ISPs) often handle these registration on behalf of their clients.

The IP address is typically used by machines. Domain names are human friendly addresses that map to IP addresses. When you type in a domain name (such as http://www.wacko.org) a nameserver looks up the IP address and connects thus to the appropriate server.

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ISDN

Integrated Services Digital Network

ISDN is a digital communications standard that works over analog phone lines. ISDN is a point-to-point communication system.
Technically ISDN has a B and D channel. A B Channel (bearer channel) carries voice and data at 64Kb/s, while the D Channel (data channel) handles signaling at 16Kb/s or 64Kb/s, depending on the service type.
The K for "kilo" in ISDN terminology may be confusing to people from the IT environment. This K literally means 1000 (i.e. 10³), while the K in IT means 1'024 (i.e. 2¹⁰).

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ISO

International Standards Organization

The ISO is an international body that certifies standards ranging from visual signs (such as the i-sign for information, seen at places such as airports and information kiosks) to language characters (such as proposed by ANSI and ASCII ). SGML standards are also decided by the ISO since it became a standard in 1986. HTML is a subclass of SGML, and complies in that respect to ISO standards, but HTML itself is not an ISO standard.

If you are a programmer of an HTML browser you definitely need to know the ISO standards. As an HTML author following a certain release of HTML you only need to know that release as recommended by the W3C (and fortunately not SGML).
There are many ISO standards that form the basis of multimedia related products. For example, the MPEG-1 ISO standard made possible CD's (see MPEG).

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ISOC

Internet Society

ISOC is a non-profit society concerned with the state of the internet. It publishes a newsletter Internet Society News and holds an annual conference, INET.

Web address: http://www.isoc.org

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ISP

Internet Service Provider

An ISP provides users access to the Internet. This access is possible through dial-up connections such as through analogue or ISDN modems. Access is also possible through many other means, such as diginet lines, ADSL, microwaves, radiowaves, etc.