WFS:
A Web Feature Service (WFS) is a transfer service for requesting and delivering geographic vector data. The communication and delivery of the data is done by means of XML. The data is delivered in the form of a schema specific to geographic data, better known as GML (Geography Markup Language) .
The WFS standard (ISO19142) is developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) . The WFS services offered by Profisi support versions 1.1.0 and 2.0.0 of this standard.
The WFS standard defines three operations:
GetCapabilities: Operation that displays all metadata inherent to this service;
DescribeFeatureType: Operation that provides a description of the structure of the data;
GetFeature: Operation that provides the data.
In contrast to Web Map Services, there are only a limited number of applications that can use these services. Also on the server side, the implementation of the standard is less common. A WFS focuses mainly on querying the data, while a WMS is more intended for viewing the data.