What is WFS?

The Web Feature Service (WFS) is an OGC specification that defines operations to manipulate information about geographic features. These operations allow you to execute transactions on spatial data through the Web; these transactions include query, update or delete. The geometric descriptions of features in the web feature service specification are encoded in Geography Markup Language, and constitute the actual raw data of the feature’s spatial description.

Let’s say you are building a map with a web map service, and would like to highlight a certain river. Since the web map server delivers only an image of the data, you cannot change the data in any way. You need a web feature service to give you control over the features included in your map.

Click on the numbers below to follow the steps involved in processing requests from a web feature service.