2. Terminology

In this documentation we apply a vocabulary based on the following figure.

2.1. Wave generator

A wave generator is any program or script capable of constructing a sound SWD-file. There are no restrictions on theoretical models applied in wave generators.

2.2. Application program

Any program or scripts applying a SWD-file and the associated API for evaluating the spectral wave kinematics is referred to as an application program.

2.3. The Spectral-Wave-Data (SWD) file

All SWD files comply with the file format as specified in this documentation. It contains the spectral description of a particular wave field as explained in the theory section.

2.4. API

This documentation describes an object oriented interface for evaluation of wave kinematics based on the contents of a SWD file. This interface is considered the SWD-API (the Application-Programming-Interface).

This API, including an implementation, is distributed as part of the spectral_wave_data repository. Source code and precompiled libraries are available in several promgramming languages. C++, C, Fortrran-2008, Python-2 and Python-3.

Site specific or vendor optimized implementations complying with this API are considered SWD compliant if numerical results do not differ significantly from results using the code in this repository.