(Wide Area Information Servers) - A commercial software package that allows the indexing of huge quantities of information, and then making those indices searchable across networks such as the Internet. A prominent feature of WAIS is that the search results are ranked (scored) according to how relevant the hits are, and that subsequent searches can find more stuff like that last batch and thus refine the search process.

(Wide Area Network) - Any internet or network that covers an area larger than a single building or campus.

See Also: LAN, Network

See: WWW

(World Wide Web) - Frequently used (incorrectly) when referring to "The Internet", WWW has two major meanings. First, loosely used: the whole constellation of resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, USENET, WAIS and some other tools. Second, the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers) which are the servers that allow text, graphics, sound files, etc. to be mixed together.

See Also: Browser, FTP, Gopher, HTTP, Telnet, URL, WAIS