Working with WFS services

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.

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.

Making direct use of WFS services in ArcGIS 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.