An overview of the From WFS toolset

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.'s (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.

Making direct use of WFS services in ArcGIS for Desktop is relatively simple. You can use WFS services as if you are working with a feature class. Anywhere that you can use a feature class, you can typically substitute the name of the WFS service. For example, you can add a map layer in ArcMap using a WFS service as the data source.

This toolset provides a tool to convert the features from WFS into a feature class to provide more functionality for those features.

Tool	Description
WFS To Feature Class	Imports a feature type from a web feature service (WFS) to a feature class in a geodatabase.

Tools in the From WFS toolset