Second Life Grid Glossary

What are the components of a grid?

In here components of a grid should be defined without looking at a possible implementation.

Agent

A entity (can be a real person or a bot) interacting with other agents eventually with a region.

Region

Some space. It can have any form. It can be grouped together with other regions.

Asset

some entity which can be transferred from agent to agent or from agent to region or from region to agent. It can be something like an object, texture, sound, link, landmark

It's basically just a piece of data with a type

Avatar

The representation of an agent in a region (or somewhere else, like on the web)

Viewer

A program which (possibly) controls an agent (eventually inside a region)

Service

A Web Services invocable resource which performs some task on behalf of a region

Utility

A Service, or collection of services which provides a utility which does not manifest as a region, agent or avatar within the virtual world.

Currency, Identity, Asset Storage, Messaging, Presence, and a topology management are examples of Utilities