The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) is a standard protocol for serving geographic features across the web. The GIS feature information that is encoded and transported using WFS includes both feature geometry and feature attribute values.
The feature information in WFS is encoded using Geography Markup Language (GML), which is used to express geographic information using XML. The GML Simple Features profile is recommended for use with ArcGIS and is the basis for WFS support in ArcGIS.
The basic web feature service supports feature query and retrieval. A transactional web feature service (called WFS-T) enables the creation, deletion, and updating of features.
Production Mapping provides a way to consume WFS data, perform edit operations, and publish the resulting changes back to the service.
For more information about WFS services, see the Open Geospatial Consortium website.
Why use a WFS service?
Serving your data through a WFS service allows any application that can work with web services to access geographic features from your map or enterprise geodatabase. In contrast to the ArcGIS for Desktop WFS toolset—which provides a tool to convert features from WFS into a feature class with added functionality for those features—WFS editing for Production Mapping returns actual features with geometry and attributes that can be used in any type of geospatial analysis. You can also perform spatial and attribute queries on the data using the available filters.
Technical notes
- WFS service supports transactions for editing (WFS-T) if enabled, allowing you to publish insertions, modifications, and deletions.
- WFS 1.1.0 is supported for transactions between the client and the service. WFS 1.0.0 can only be used for viewing the data.
- WFS services use Geography Markup Language (GML) to encode the feature data. GML is just a way of using XML to represent geographic information. The GML used by ArcGIS Server WFS services uses the Simple Features profile.
- Feature locking is not supported.