Introduction

About This Document

This document covers the concepts of Web Feature Service (WFS), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) standards for WFS, capabilities of WFS, and ways to integrate WFS in GIS-based custom application development.

Target Audience

This document is designed to help developers of GIS-based custom application development. Developers unfamiliar with WFS can read about the WFS framework, capabilities, integration procedures and development best practices to design methods for creating innovative world-class GIS applications.

What is WFS?

The OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) interface standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls.

The basic Web Feature Service allows querying and retrieval of Features. A transactional Web Feature Service (WFS-T) allows creation, deletion, and updating of Features.

The WFS describes discovery, query, or data transformation operations. The client generates the request and posts it to a Web Feature server using HTTPS. The Web Feature server then executes the request. The WFS specification uses HTTPS as the distributed computing platform, although this is not a hard requirement.

References

http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Feature_Service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS#OGC_standards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language