In 2000, LexisNexis purchased RiskWise, a St. Cloud, Minnesota company. In 2002 it acquired a Canadian research database company, Quicklaw. In 2004, Reed Elsevier Group, parent company of LexisNexis, purchased Seisint, Inc, of Boca Raton, Florida.
Format for interchanging spreadsheet/database data; recognized by Filemaker, Excel, and others. MER stands for Format for interchanging spreadsheet/database data; recognized by Filemaker, Excel, and others.
WAVE PCM soundfile format. The WAVE file format is a subset of Microsoft's RIFF specification for the storage of multimedia files. A RIFF file starts out with a file header followed by a sequence of data chunks. A WAVE file is often just a RIFF file with a single WAVE chunk which consists of two sub-chunks -- a fmt  chunk specifying the data format and a data chunk containing the actual sample data. Call this form the Canonical form. Who knows how it really all works.