Users of the waterway have needs for many types of information while out on their boats. Specifically, commercial fishermen use a variety of methods to receive weather and tide information, including radio communication with other fishermen and calls to shore to receive weather updates. They use their GPS and radar units for navigation, but also have official navigation maps are printed and stored somewhere on the vessel. The primary way that commercial fishermen receive updates on fishery closures is by word-of-mouth or internet dependent notifications.

WAVE begins to address some of these issues by aggregating multiple sources of information and available datasets and bringing them to mobile devices. Many of the datasets that WAVE incorporates is either currently not mobile-friendly or was entirely unavailable to mobile devices.

Much of the data currently available in WAVE is targeted towards commercial fishermen on the southern Louisiana coast, especially the Vermillion Bay region, but several functions can be useful anywhere in the world.