What is Sherpa in he context of an ITSM tool?

i know sherpa in human social life means people who knows about mountain and living in mountain. can be guides like etc., but in the sense of ITSM tools and programming what does it mean ? say example am working with an ITSM tool called Hp service manager. in this the tickets are created by sherpa. even the web services exposed also has this concept of sherpa and through this only we can call functions to create tickets.

1. create sherpa ()
2. update sherpa () and so on.

but when i read the documentation of web services from HP service manger site there is nothing called sherpa in it.Hp service manager HPSM9 web services guide link

So it is obvious that this client whom i am working with has done this Sherpa implementation . so my questions are

1. what is this sherpa here ?
2. why it is implemented ?
3. if i write a web service program for a sherpa type web service could that be re-usable for other client ?
4. is this sherpa is for only old type web services , or is it a latest concept ?