O

OCR Optical Character Recognition

Technology for scanning printed or handwritten documents and storing the results on a computer.

Office XP Interop

Assembly that allows unmanaged code providing access to Office XP functionality to be called from managed .NET code. Acts as a wrapper to some of the core Office XP products, such as Microsoft Word and Excel.

OLAP Online Analytical Processing

Technology whereby raw data is stored in a multidimensional format so that it can be analyzed easily by decision-makers. An OLAP server, such as Microsoft's Analysis Server, is able to store and process large quantities of OLAP data.

OLE DB for Data Mining

Microsoft specification extending the OLE DB standard that comprises the set of COM-based interfaces exposing data from various sources. Contains detailed information about things like query syntax, mining models to utilize, prediction functions, and the XML format to store mining-model results.

Orcas

Code name for an upcoming release of Visual Studio that should coincide with the release of Longhorn. Part of Microsoft's Roadmap to the future for development tools and expected to follow the release of Whidbey.