Certain terminology is used consistently throughout the Xoom documentation and tools to refer to concepts that have a well-defined meaning in the context of Xoom. Here, we define the most important of those terms in a logical order (not alphabetically).

Managed application

The software application or a set of applications managed by Xoom. At the time of writing, this would most commonly be ClickSoftware Service Optimization.

Managed system, environment

A specific computer system on which the managed application is installed, and Xoom is installed and set up in a way that it can manage that specific installation of the managed application.

Configuration

The parameters that define the behaviour of the managed system. This includes all levels of configuration that are supported, from application and more commonly customisation files, over information schema, to intra-application settings such as rules, logic domains, agents, integration settings.

Data

The values that are produced and used during the operation of the managed system, such as skills, regions or tasks in ClickSoftware Service Optimization. The former two are examples of static data, and the latter of transactional data.
Xoom is intended to manage the configuration and static data of the managed system, but not the transactional data.

Environment-independent representation

The representation of the configuration and static data of the managed system that abstracts away information that is tied to that single instance of the installed system. Removing reliance on such information making such representation portable to other environments. In Service Optimization, keys and UDP IDs are examples of information that can differ between functionally identical environments, and therefore can’t be used to identify individual items and needs to be replaced by other identifiers.

Xoom data

The representation of the configuration and static data including Xoom meta-data. Xoom’s representation format is XML. Xoom data combines the information from different levels of configuration (files, schema, configuration, data) into a single representation.

Xoom meta-data

The information about the identity of various parts of Xoom data, the references between those parts and other information needed to supplement the representation of the data as used by the managed application itself to make the representation portable and also to facilitate its analysis and reporting.

Xoom file

The file containing Xoom data.

Xoom type

The specific kind of information represented by Xoom. A few examples are scheme collections, groups and regions.

Xoom item

A specific, identifiable entity that is part of the configuration or data represented by Xoom. Each Xoom item has:

• a specific type and
• one or more environment-independent identifiers.

Xoom ID

A unique identifier of each Xoom item, composed of its type and bar-separated environment-independent identifiers in square brackets.