W
WAIS
Wide Area Information Services. A client/server software system that provides sophisticated indexing of files based on all words in each files and provides scoring and "relevance feedback" of documents to its clients. The client then selects which file or files to retrieve from the server from a list of file or document titles, ranked by a score assigned by the software.
WAN
Wide Area Network. Computer data communications technology that connects computers at remote sites. WANs are composed of special data communications hardware and software and usually operates across public or dedicated telephone networks.
warping
Any process in which an object is stretched differentially so as to change its internal geometry. This shape change could be defined by any one of many transformations, such as changing a map projection, trilateration to change the absolute position of specified nodes in the vector object, fitting a polynomial to a surface, least squares movement of control nodes, and so on.
watershed
The entire area above a given point (called the watershed "seed") that drains into that point. A hydrological drainage region. A watershed can drain into a single stream, stream network, or body of water. Each region is defined based on the occurrence of a cell or cells in the input raster having an elevation which is lower than the pour points elevation defines the lower extremity / extremities of the basin. As such each watershed polygon contains one or more depression(s).
watershed basin raster
A raster in which all cells of a given watershed have the same value so that different watersheds appear different colors or shades of gray when displayed.
watershed seed point
The point at the base of a watershed into which all points in the watershed drain; often taken as the mouth of a stream or river.
wetness
The physical property mapped by Kauth's greenness, brightness, wetness transformations on Landsat TM images. It measures how wet the combined vegetation and soil surface is, including the water suspended in the vegetation biomass.
widget
A graphical X object such as a button, separator, menu bar, or scroll bar. Widgets are composed of data structures and procedures. Widget manipulations are supported by Xtoolkits; in particular by GUI libraries such as the one from OSF/Motif.
window family
A single primary window and all of its associated secondary windows.
window manager
A special client application in X that provides user controls for window size and position. Several window managers are available for X.
wireframe
A graphical representation of a two-dimensional or three-dimensional solid or surface by means of regularly-spaced, connected line segments. The wireframe surface looks as if it had been molded by a flexible wire mesh. Computer systems use wireframe representations for many intermediate 3D renderings because they take much less processing time to create and manipulate than a continuous-surface representation.
WORM cartridge
Write Once, Read Many drive. A type of drive that reads and writes to non-erasable optical disks, which are used for permanent, high-capacity file storage. WORM disks are empty when purchased, and the user can write files to them until they are full. Data is recorded with reflective pits in the coating laid on the surface of a glass or metal disk. Once the pits have been burned into the coating, they cannot be removed, which makes this medium non-erasable. (See also: erasable optical cartridge, erasable optical drive, optical disk)
WO drive
See - WORM cartridge