Editing Web Feature Service (section)

{{Short description|Technical standard for retrieving GIS data}}
In [[computing]], the [[Open Geospatial Consortium]] '''Web Feature Service''' ('''WFS''') Interface Standard provides an [[Interface (computer science)|interface]] allowing requests for [[Geography|geographical]] features across the [[World Wide Web|web]] using platform-independent calls.  One can think of geographical features as the "[[source code]]" behind a map, whereas the [[Web Map Service|WMS]] interface or online [[Tiled web map|tiled mapping]] portals like [[Google Maps]] return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or [[Geographic information system#Spatial analysis with GIS|spatially analyze]].  The [[XML]]-based [[Geography Markup Language]] (GML) furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting geographic features, but other formats like [[shapefile]]s can also serve for transport. In early 2006 the [[Open Geospatial Consortium|OGC]] members approved the OpenGIS GML Simple Features Profile.<ref>{{cite web| url=http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=15201 | access-date=2023-10-31 | title=Geography Markup Language (GML) simple features profile}}</ref> This profile is designed both to increase interoperability between WFS servers and to improve the ease of implementation of the WFS standard.

The OGC membership defined and maintains the WFS specification.  Numerous commercial and [[Open-source software|open-source]] implementations of the WFS interface standard exist, including the open-source reference implementations [[GeoServer]] and [[deegree]]. The OGC Implementing Products page<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource/products/byspec/?specid=50|title=Implementations by Specification &#124; OGC|website=www.opengeospatial.org}}</ref>
provides a comprehensive list of WFS implementations.