Alignment

Encyclopedia : A : AL : ALI : Alignment

Alignment is the adjustment of an object in relation with other objects, or a static orientation of some object or set of objects in relation to others.

An alignment of megaliths: see stone row.
Alignment (role-playing games) refers to the moral and ethical perspective of (fictional) characters.

It has a more specific meaning in some disciplines:

Typographic alignment, in typesetting, lines of text or images can be aligned left, right, centered or justified.
Sequence alignment shows similarities between protein or nucleic acid sequences (also in bioinformatics).
Structural alignment presents similarities in 3D structure of protein molecules.
Wheel alignment in an automobile means adjustment of the camber, castor, and/or toe to improve performance and maintain proper tire wear characteristics of the car
Data structure alignment, in computer programming, refers to arranging data in memory
Parallel text alignment, in artificial intelligence
Ontology alignment, in heterogeneous knowledge bases, the expression of the correspondences between two ontologies is called ontology alignment
Body alignment, in sport and dance, the proper placement of the bones so that the muscles do less work
Morphosyntactic alignment, in linguistics, the properties determining the grammatical relationship between verbal arguments of various kinds
Fibre alignment, in optoelectronics, to connect two Optical fibers to each other

Other fields where the term "alignment" has a particular meaning:

Ley line, an interpretation of an alignment of a number of places of geographical interest, such as ancient megaliths. Archaeogeodesy is the study of such alignments.
In integrated circuit fabrication, alignment is the step in a photolithographic process in which a mask used to pattern a layer of the circuit is registered in its x-y position with respect to the wafer (usually silicon) on which the circuit is being formed.

This is a [disambiguationdisambiguation] page: a list of articles associated with the same title. If an referred you to this page, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.