Why should I use a WFS?

As you have just seen, the web feature service has many advantages, including:

• It is vendor-neutral. A web feature service enables raw data to be served to any client. The raw data can contain the geometric descriptions of features as well as other accompanying information about the features.
  
  
• It is interoperable. Because it is based on GML, a web feature service offers a common, standardized format for accessing geospatial data.
  
  
• It is easy to use. Data providers can use a web feature service to maintain their data collections, whereas data consumers can use a WFS to retrieve specific information about specific geospatial features.

More WFS in action

Geoffrey works with an emergency response team, which relies on receiving weather data in Near Real Time with various automated climate monitoring stations. Geoffrey’s system is a WFS GetFeatures client; the automated station is a WFS transaction client. Today, Geoffrey and his colleagues must prepare for casualties due to a severe thunder storm with lightning.

Geoffrey calls a web-based incident reporting application. He types in an address and details of the weather incident (thunder storm). The application calls a geocoding service and gets back a location encoded in GML. It writes the locations and the incident details to a local database using WFS. It then queries the local database WFS for similar incidents within a 3 km radius of this incident, and within the last 6 months. It then queries a “corporate” GIS database using WFS to find the closest hospital and the corresponding police zone, and sends all this information back to Geoffrey in a report.

Click here to view an excerpt of GML code that is returned to Geoffrey.