The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the "source code" behind a map, whereas the WMS interface or online mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze. The XML-based GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting the geographic features, but other formats like shapefiles can also serve for transport. In early 2006, the OGC members approved the OpenGIS GML Simple Features Profile . This profile is designed to both 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. There are numerous commercial and open source implementations of the WFS interface standard, including an open source reference implementation, called GeoServer. A comprehensive list of WFS implementations can be found at the OGC Implementing Products page .
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