Overview
The WFS specification defines interfaces for describing data manipulation operations of geographic features. Data manipulation operations include the ability to:
- get or query features based on spatial and non-spatial constraints
- create a new feature instance
- delete a feature instance
- update a feature instance
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.
A WFS describes discovery, query, or data transformation operations. The client generates the request and posts it to a web feature server using HTTP. The web feature server then executes the request. The WFS specification uses HTTP as the distributed computing platform, although this is not a hard requirement.
There are two encodings defined for WFS operations:
- XML (amenable to HTTP POST/SOAP)
- Keyword-Value pairs (amenable to HTTP GET/Remote procedure call)
In the taxonomy of Web Services, WFS is best categorized as a non-RESTful RPC type service.
Read more about this topic: Web Feature Service