Protocol (Vocabulary: Science and Government Terms)

PROTOCOL (Vocabulary: Science and Government Terms)

Protocol originally meant something like "a summary on the first page of a document." But it has come to mean a proper procedure, and is often used in these four fields:

• politics: a formal agreement between nation states, as the Kyoto Protocol, a former international treaty aimed at reducing green house gas emissions.
• diplomacy: protocols are a set of international courtesy rules, meant to maintain harmony in meetings and negotiations even between hostile nations.
• science: protocols are predefined written procedures for conducting experiments. They help standardize methods to permit replication of results by others.
• computers: a communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more elements in a communications system to--well--communicate. For example, the "http:" you see at the start of every full URL means "HyperText Transfer Protocol."

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