FITS-WCS paper 1 defines IWC as a Cartesian coordinate system with one axis for each WCS axis, and is the coordinate system produced by the rotation matrix (represented by FITS keyword PCi_j, CDi_j, etc). For instance, for a 2-D FITS-WCS header describing projected celestial longitude and latitude, the intermediate world coordinates represent offsets in degrees from the reference point within the plane of projection.
AST A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy