Help:Glossary

This page contains a glossary of terms commonly used in XMS. Many of these terms have usage specific to XMS and may or may not coincide with how these terms are used elsewhere.

A

arc

sequences of line segments or edges, which are grouped together as a single "polyline" entity.

arc group

multiple arcs that have been grouped together so they can be selected at once.

B

breakline

a series of edges to which the mesh or scatter triangles should conform.

C

centerline

arc that represents the direction of a river from upstream to downstream.

contour

a curve along which the function has a constant value.

coverage

groups of feature objects in the Map module.

cross section

arcs used to extract elevations.

D

dialog

a window that pops up after a command is executed. May also be called a window, tool, or editor.

E

element

used to describe the area to be modeled. Elements are formed by joining nodes. May be 1D, triangular, or quadratic.

F

feature object

patterned after Geographic Information Systems (GIS) objects and include points, nodes, arcs, and polygons.

G

graphics window

the main portion of the XMS program that gives a visual representation of the project.

I

isosurace

a surface of constant value extracted from a 3D dataset.

M

macro

button that executes a commonly used command.

menu

a list of commands. Can be found at the top of the XMS interface or by right-clicking on items.

N

node

define the beginning and ending XY locations of an arc.

nodestring

a collection of nodes.

P

point

XY locations that are not attached to an arc.

polygon

a group of connected arcs that form a closed loop.

project explorer

the portion of the interface that lists datasets and components of the project.

S

spectral energy

represents energy densities at discrete values over a range of angles and a range of frequencies for a given wave condition.

V

vertex

XY locations along arcs in between the beginning and ending nodes.