  The classical characterization of \wp, as a typical concept for far field
phenomena, has been successfully applied to many \w phenomena in past decades.
The recent reports of superluminal tunnelling times and negative group
velocities challenged this concept. A new local approach for the definition of
\wvs avoiding these difficulties while including the classical definitions as
particular cases is proposed here. This generalisation of the conventional
non-local approach can be applied to arbitrary \w forms and propagation media.
Some applications of the formalism are presented and basic properties of the
concept are summarized.
