Abbreviations and Acronyms Glossary⚓︎
Short Answer⚓︎
This page lists all 405 abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms used across TCAT Wiki documentation and TCAT platforms and tools.
Significance⚓︎
TCAT documentation spans transportation, accessibility, geospatial, and software domains, each with their own vocabulary. A shared, machine-readable glossary helps all audiences — planners, advocates, developers, and the public — interpret documentation correctly without specialist background, and allows assistants to resolve abbreviations precisely.
What This Means⚓︎
The table below maps each abbreviated form to its full expansion. Entries are sorted alphabetically and sourced directly from includes/abbreviations.md, the single source of truth for all abbreviations used site-wide.
| Abbreviation | Expansion |
|---|---|
| 2D | Two-Dimensional |
| 2FA | Two-Factor Authentication |
| 3D | Three-Dimensional |
| 3DEP | 3D Elevation Program |
| A11y | Accessibility |
| AADT | Annual Average Daily Traffic |
| AASHO | American Association of State Highway Officials |
| AASHTO | American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials |
| ABA | Architectural Barriers Act |
| ACL | Association for Computational Linguistics |
| ACM | Association for Computing Machinery |
| ADA | Americans with Disabilities Act |
| ADS | Aging and Disability Services |
| AFDC | Aid to Families with Dependent Children |
| AFN | Access and Functional Needs |
| AI | Artificial Intelligence |
| AKB | Assistant Knowledge Base |
| AOI | Area of Interest |
| API | Application Programming Interface |
| APS | Accessible Pedestrian Signal |
| APTA | American Public Transit Association |
| ARIA | Accessible Rich Internet Applications |
| ARNOLD | All Road Network of Linear Referenced Data |
| ASCE | American Society of Civil Engineers |
| ASME | American Society of Mechanical Engineers |
| ASR | AVIV ScoutRoute |
| AST | Abstract Syntax Tree |
| ASTM | American Society for Testing and Materials |
| AT-DaWG | Active Transportation Data Working Group |
| ATP | Active Transportation Plan |
| ATSAC | Cooper Jones Active Transportation Safety Advisory Council |
| ATSC | Cooper Jones Active Transportation Safety Council |
| ATTRI | Accessible Transportation Technologies Research Initiative |
| AVIV | Accessibility Verification, Improved Validation |
| AVIV SR | AVIV ScoutRoute |
| BART | Bay Area Rapid Transit |
| BBox | Bounding Box |
| BC | Betweenness Centrality |
| BCA | Benefit-Cost Analysis |
| BCR | Benefit-Cost Ratio |
| BEV | Bird's-Eye View |
| BFS | Breadth-First Search |
| BLIP | Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training |
| BLV | Blind and Low-Vision |
| BRT | Bus Rapid Transit |
| BSAC | Cooper Jones Bicyclist Safety Advisory Council |
| BTS | Bureau of Transportation Statistics |
| BVLOS | Beyond Visual Line of Sight |
| CAD | Computer-Aided Design |
| CADD | Computer-Aided Design and Drafting |
| Cal-ITP | California Integrated Travel Project |
| CALACT | California Association for Coordinated Transportation |
| CC0 | Creative Commons Zero |
| CCMS | Component Content Management System |
| CCR | Community Comparison Ratio |
| CDP | Census-Designated Place |
| CHIIR | Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval |
| CIEP | Coalition on Inclusive Emergency Planning |
| CMF | Crash Modification Factor |
| CMIST | Communications, Maintaining Health, Independence, Support, Safety, and Self-Determination, and Transportation |
| CMP | Congestion Management Process |
| CNG | Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum |
| COCO | Common Objects in Context |
| COE | College of Engineering |
| COG | Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF |
| CoT | Chain-of-Thought |
| CRAB | Washington State County Road Administration Board |
| CREATE | Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences |
| CRS | Coordinate Reference System |
| CSE | Computer Science and Engineering |
| CSID | Complete Streets Infrastructure Division |
| CSS | Cascading Style Sheets |
| CSUN | California State University, Northridge |
| CSV | Comma-Separated Values |
| CTANW | Community Transportation Association of the Northwest |
| CUGOS | Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source |
| CVPR | Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| DARTS | Delta Area Rural Transportation System |
| DB | Design-Build / Database |
| dBA | Decibels Adjusted |
| DBB | Design-Bid-Build |
| DE-9IM | Dimensionally Extended Nine-Intersection Model |
| DEM | Digital Elevation Model |
| DESA | Department of Economic and Social Affairs |
| DFS | Depth-First Search |
| DITA | Darwin Information Typing Architecture |
| DOT | Department of Transportation |
| DS | Data Science |
| DSB | Department of Services for the Blind |
| DSM | Digital Surface Model |
| DTD | Document Type Definition |
| DTM | Digital Terrain Model |
| DXF | Drawing Exchange Format |
| ECCV | European Conference on Computer Vision |
| EFA | Equity Focus Area |
| EMNLP | Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing |
| EPA | Environmental Protection Agency |
| EPSG | European Petroleum Survey Group |
| EPV | Events Per Variable |
| ETL | Extract, Transform, Load |
| ETRS89 | European Terrestrial Reference System 1989 |
| EVLOS | Extended Visual Line of Sight |
| FAA | Federal Aviation Administration |
| FARS | Fatality Analysis Reporting System |
| FDE | Fundamental Data Elements |
| FEMA | Federal Emergency Management Agency |
| FGTS | Freight & Goods Transportation System |
| FHWA | Federal Highway Administration |
| FIFA | Fédération Internationale de Football Association |
| FNS | Food and Nutrition Service |
| FQHC | Federally Qualified Health Center |
| FRA | Federal Railroad Administration |
| FTA | Federal Transit Administration |
| G3ict | Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies |
| GAAD | Global Accessibility Awareness Day |
| GATIS | General Active Transportation Infrastructure Specification |
| GDP | Gross Domestic Product |
| GeoAI | Geospatial Artificial Intelligence |
| GERS | Global Entity Reference System |
| GIG | GoInfoGame |
| GIS | Geographic Information System |
| GIS-T | Geospatial Information Systems for Transportation |
| GML | Geography Markup Language |
| GNSS | Global Navigation Satellite System |
| GOFS | General On-Demand Transit Feed Specification |
| GPS | Global Positioning System |
| GPT | Generative Pre-trained Transformer |
| GPX | GPS Exchange Format |
| GS | Gaussian Solutions |
| GTFS | General Transit Feed Specification |
| GTFS-Flex | General Transit Feed Specification, Flex Extension |
| GTFS-Pathways | General Transit Feed Specification, Pathways Extension |
| GWF | Geospatial World Forum |
| GXAPS | Grade Crossing Accident Prediction System |
| HAWK | High-Intensity Activated Crosswalk Beacon |
| HCDE | Human Centered Design & Engineering |
| HCI | Human-Computer Interaction |
| HCIR | Human Computer Information Retrieval |
| HCT | High-Capacity Transit |
| HEAT | Health Economic Assessment Tool |
| HIN | High Injury Network |
| HOT | Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team |
| HOV | High Occupancy Vehicle |
| HTH | Health Through Housing |
| HTML | Hypertext Markup Language |
| HuskyADAPT | Accessible Design And Play Technology |
| HxGN | Hexagon (aerial imagery provider) |
| ICCV | International Conference on Computer Vision |
| ICLR | International Conference on Learning Representations |
| ICML | International Conference on Machine Learning |
| IDW | Inverse Distance Weighting |
| IEEE | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers |
| IFDS | Institute for Foundations of Data Science |
| IHSDM | Interactive Highway Safety Design Model |
| IIiX | Information Interaction in Context |
| IJCV | International Journal of Computer Vision |
| IMCL | International Making Cities Livable |
| IoU | Intersection over Union |
| IRB | Internal Review Board |
| ISB | Industrial Service Boundary |
| ISPRS | International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing |
| ISTEA | Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 |
| ITE | Institute of Transportation Engineers |
| ITS | Intelligent Transportation System |
| IXN | Intersection / Intersection Traversability Metric |
| JASA | Journal of the American Statistical Association |
| JCDL | Joint Conference on Digital Libraries |
| JOSM | Java OpenStreetMap Editor |
| JPRS | Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing |
| JSON | JavaScript Object Notation |
| JSX | JavaScript XML |
| KML | Keyhole Markup Language |
| KPI | Key Performance Indicator |
| KV | Key-Value |
| LAION | Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network |
| lat | Latitude |
| LFQD | Long Form Quest Definition |
| LiDAR | Light Detection and Ranging |
| LLaVA | Large Language and Vision Assistant |
| LLM | Large Language Model |
| LoD | Level of Detail |
| lon | Longitude |
| LoRA | Low-Rank Adaptation |
| LoS | Line of Sight |
| LRS | Linear Referencing System |
| LRTP | Long-Range Transportation Plan |
| LVLM | Large Vision Language Model |
| MAIS | Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale |
| MBTA | Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol |
| MDIP | Mobility Data Interoperability Principles |
| MDOT | Michigan Department of Transportation |
| MEF | Maximum Extent Feasible |
| MGRS | Military Grid Reference System |
| MIC | Manufacturing Industrial Center / Mobility Innovation Center |
| MIRE | Model Inventory of Roadway Elements |
| ML | Machine Learning |
| MLLM | Multimodal Large Language Model |
| MnDOT | Minnesota Department of Transportation |
| MNY26 | Mappy New Year 2026 |
| MOD | Mobility-on-Demand |
| MOU | Memorandum of Understanding |
| MP | MultiPolygon |
| MPO | Metropolitan Planning Organization |
| MUTCD | Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices |
| MVT | Mapbox Vector Tile |
| NAACL | North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics |
| NACIS | North American Cartographic Information Society |
| NACTO | National Association of City Transportation Officials |
| NAD27 | North American Datum 1927 |
| NAD83 | North American Datum 1983 |
| NC-BPAID | National Collaboration on Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Accessibility Infrastructure Data |
| NCDOT | North Carolina Department of Transportation |
| NCHRP | National Cooperative Highway Research Program |
| NCST | National Center for Sustainable Transportation |
| NCTRP | National Cooperative Transit Research and Development Program |
| NDA | Nondrivers Alliance |
| NDVI | Normalized Difference Vegetation Index |
| NEMT | Non-Emergency Medical Transportation |
| NetCDF | Network Common Data Form |
| NeurIPS | Neural Information Processing Systems |
| NHERI | Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure |
| NHS | National Highway System |
| NHTS | National Household Travel Survey |
| NHTSA | National Highway Traffic Safety Administration |
| NIR | Near-Infrared |
| NOAA | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration |
| NOTICE | Noise-free Text-Image Corruption and Evaluation |
| NOx | Nitrogen Oxides |
| NPV | Net Present Value |
| NSF | National Science Foundation |
| NSR | Normalized Sidewalk Reach |
| NYPL | New York Public Library |
| O&M | Operating and Maintenance |
| OakDOT | City of Oakland Department of Transportation |
| OCR | Optical Character Recognition |
| OD | Origin-Destination |
| ODOT | Oregon Department of Transportation |
| OECR | Office of Equity and Civil Rights |
| OGC | Open Geospatial Consortium |
| OMB | Office of Management and Budget |
| OMF | Open Mobility Foundation |
| ORCA | One Regional Card for All |
| OS-CONNECT | OpenSidewalks COnsistent Network for accessible Navigation and Equitable Connectivity through Transit |
| OSM | OpenStreetMap |
| OSMF | OpenStreetMap Foundation |
| OSMUS | OpenStreetMap US |
| OSW | OpenSidewalks |
| OSWMH | OpenSidewalks Mappy Hours |
| OTP | OpenThePaths / OpenTripPlanner |
| OTP25 | OpenThePaths 2025 |
| OTP26 | OpenThePaths 2026 |
| PacTrans | Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium |
| Portable Document Format | |
| PDO | Property Damage Only |
| PE | Project Engineer |
| PED XING | Pedestrian Crossing |
| PI | Principal Investigator |
| PII | Personally Identifiable Information |
| PM | Particulate Matter |
| PMP | Pedestrian Mobility Profile |
| POC | Point of Contact |
| POI | Point of Interest |
| POIs | Points of Interest |
| PPNA | Personalized Pedestrian Network Analysis |
| PROST | Parks, Recreation, Open Space, and Trails |
| PROWAG | Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines |
| PSAC | Pedestrian Safety Advisory Council |
| PSRC | Puget Sound Regional Council |
| PUMA | Public Use Microdata Area |
| PUMS | Public Use Microdata Sample |
| PWG | Pedestrian Working Group |
| QA | Quality Assurance |
| QC | Quality Control |
| RACI | Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed |
| RAG | Retrieval-Augmented Generation |
| RCTO | Regional Concept for Transportation Operations |
| RCW | Revised Code of Washington |
| RGC | Regional Growth Center |
| RL | Reinforcement Learning |
| ROW | Right of Way |
| RRFB | Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacon |
| RSO | Registered Student Organization |
| RTAN | Regional Transportation Accessibility Network |
| RTD | Denver Regional Transportation District |
| RTOR | Right Turn on Red |
| RTPO | Regional Transportation Planning Organization |
| SAE | Society of Automotive Engineers |
| SAFETEA-LU | Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users |
| SAM | Segment Anything Model |
| SAM-Road | Segment Anything Model for Road Network Graph Extraction |
| SCLIO | Specialized Community-Led Impact Opportunity |
| SDI | Spatial Data Infrastructure |
| SDOT | Seattle Department of Transportation |
| SEPTA | Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority |
| SfM | Structure from Motion |
| SFT | Supervised Fine-Tuning |
| SGR | State of Good Repair |
| SHSP | Strategic Highway Safety Plan |
| SIGIR | Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval |
| SIGKDD | Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining |
| SLAM | Simultaneous Location and Mapping |
| SLD | Styled Layer Descriptor |
| SME | Subject Matter Expert |
| SNAP | Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program |
| SNG | Seattle Neighborhood Greenways |
| SOP | Standard Operating Procedure |
| SOTA | State of the Art |
| SOV | Single Occupancy Vehicle |
| SOW | Statement of Work |
| SOx | Sulfur Oxides |
| SPLICE | Sequential Processing for Learning and Inference in Chronological Events |
| SPM | Semantic Minimal Pairs |
| SPS | Seattle Public Schools |
| SPSA | Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation |
| SRID | Spatial Reference System Identifier |
| SRQ | Sidewalk Reach Quotient |
| SRTS | Safe Routes to School |
| SS4A | Safe Streets and Roads for All |
| SSA | Seattle Streets Alliance |
| SSO | Single Sign-On |
| STAC | SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog |
| STAR | Smart Transportation Applications and Research |
| STIP | State Transportation Improvement Program |
| STR | Symmetric Token Replacement |
| SUMC | Shared User Mobility Conference / Shared Use Mobility Center |
| SVEA | Snoqualmie Valley Economic Alliance |
| SVG | Scalable Vector Graphics |
| TAM | Transportation Asset Management |
| TAMP | Transportation Asset Management Plan |
| TANF | Temporary Assistance for Needy Families |
| TCAT | Taskar Center for Accessible Technology |
| TCAT_WSP_PG | Taskar Center for Accessible Technology Washington State Proviso Project Group |
| TCRP | Transit Cooperative Research Program |
| TDEI | Transportation Data Exchange Initiative |
| TDM | Transportation Demand Management |
| TEA-21 | Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century |
| TFTF | Transportation Funding Task Force |
| TIB | Transportation Improvement Board |
| TIN | Triangulated Irregular Network |
| TIP | Transportation Improvement Program |
| TMA | Transportation Management Areas |
| TMS | Tile Map Service |
| TOD | Time of Day |
| TOPS | TCRP Oversight and Project Selection Committee |
| TRAILS | Trail Routing, Analysis, and Information Linkage System |
| TRB | Transportation Research Board |
| TRL | Technology Readiness Level |
| TSP | Transportation Service Provider / Transportation Safety Planning |
| TTL | Time to Live |
| TTS | Text to Speech |
| TVM | Ticket Vending Machine |
| TxDOT | Texas Department of Transportation |
| UAA | University of Alaska Anchorage |
| UGA | Urban Growth Area |
| UI | User Interface / Unincorporated |
| UN | United Nations |
| UNDESA | United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs |
| US | United States |
| USDA | United States Department of Agriculture |
| USDOT | United States Department of Transportation |
| USGS | United States Geological Survey |
| UTM | Universal Transverse Mercator |
| UW | University of Washington |
| UX | User Experience |
| V-SEAM | Visual Semantic Editing and Attention Modulating |
| V2X | Vehicle-to-Everything |
| VFL | Vision Function Layer |
| VGI | Volunteered Geographic Information |
| VHR | Very High Resolution |
| VL | Vision-Language |
| VLA | Vision-Language-Action Model |
| VLM | Vision Language Model |
| VLN | Vision-and-Language Navigation |
| VLOS | Visual Line of Sight |
| VMT | Vehicle Miles Traveled |
| VQA | Visual Question Answering |
| VSI | Visual-Spatial Intelligence |
| VSL | Value of a Statistical Life |
| VSR | Visual Spatial Reasoning |
| VTTS | Value of Travel Time Savings |
| W3C | World Wide Web Consortium |
| WA | Washington (state) |
| WACV | Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision |
| WAGISA | Washington GIS Association |
| WAI | Web Accessibility Initiative |
| WAI-ARIA | Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications |
| WASILC | Washington Statewide Independent Living Council |
| WCAG | Web Content Accessibility Guidelines |
| WFS | Web Feature Service |
| WGS | World Geodetic System |
| WIC | Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children |
| WKB | Well-Known Binary |
| WKT | Well-Known Text |
| WMS | Web Map Service |
| WMTS | Web Map Tile Service |
| WSDOT | Washington State Department of Transportation |
| WSP | Washington State Proviso |
| WTSC | Washington Traffic Safety Commission |
| WWWC | World Wide Web Consortium |
| XAI | Explainable Artificial Intelligence |
| XEE | XML External Entity |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language |
| XR | Extended Reality |
| YOE | Year of Expenditure |
What This Does Not Mean⚓︎
- Entries listed here are not endorsements of or official definitions for external organizations (for example, FHWA, AASHTO, or UN).
- Expansions reflect TCAT internal usage, which may differ from general-domain usage for ambiguous abbreviations.
- This list does not cover every possible abbreviation used in external data sources or third-party tools integrated with TCAT platforms.
How To Use This⚓︎
Look up an unfamiliar abbreviation by scanning or searching the table above. For product-specific or schema-specific meanings, follow links in the relevant product documentation.
Example⚓︎
A planner reviewing an OS-CONNECT data export sees the column label "CRS". Looking up CRS in this glossary returns "Coordinate Reference System", clarifying that this field stores the spatial projection of the dataset.
Assistant Guidance⚓︎
When a user asks what an abbreviation means or an acronym stands for, retrieve the matching row from this glossary and return the expansion directly. Do not infer expansions for abbreviations not present in this table; instead, acknowledge the ambiguity and suggest the user check the relevant product documentation or contact the TCAT team.
Related Concepts⚓︎
- Dispatch registry — generated agent-layer artifact served at
https://taskarcenteratuw.github.io/tcat-wiki/assistant/dispatch.md(not linked here directly;dispatch.mdis agent-layer only and is not part of the human-facing build).