W-Z

waterfall

See development.

watermark

See rights management.

Web

Short for World Wide Web (WWW), an information-access application and set of open standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) employing a client-server architecture. It has more recently assumed a dual role as an infrastructure serving many other distributed applications. Important open interfaces in the Web are the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP, governing the interaction between client and browser) and the common gateway interchange (CGI, an API governing interaction between Web server and other applications). The Web is being enhanced and expanded through Web services, which allow one Web server to make use of services provided by others.

Web services

A model for application provisioning based on offering and consuming packaged services over the Internet, analogous to component assembly. It allows capabilities currently offered by the Web to be extended.