Web Feature Service Implementation Specification, Verson 1.1.0.

Abstract

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed a member consensus that when software vendors implement their products in compliance with open geospatial web service interface and data encoding specifications, end-users benefit from a larger pool of interoperable web based tools for geodata access and related geoprocessing services. The Web Map Server products that have been developed to implement the OGC Web Map Service Implementation Specification [1] are prime examples of such tools. The GetCapabilities and GetMap interfaces defined in that specification give users on the web an interoperable way to combine and view map images from different sources. And the GetFeatureInfo interface gives those users a way to obtain attribute information about geographic features displayed in a map with a simple mouse click. The OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Implementation Specification [2] describes an encoding specification for geodata in XML that enables the storage, transport, processing, and transformation of geographic information. This document, the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) Implementation Specification, takes the next logical step of by defining interfaces for data access and manipulation operations on geographic features using HTTP as the distributed computing platform. Via these interfaces, a web user or service can combine, use and manage geodata -- the feature information behind a map image -- from different sources by invoking the following WFS operations on geographic features and elements: • Create a new feature instance • Delete a feature instance • Update a feature instance • Lock a feature instance • Get or query features based on spatial and non-spatial constraints