Web Feature Service — an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard protocol for serving geographic features as structured data, not just rendered images.
A WFS server delivers actual geographic feature data — geometries and attributes — that client applications can query, filter, and analyze. Unlike WMS (which returns images), WFS returns data in formats like GML or GeoJSON that can be processed programmatically.
WFS supports spatial and attribute queries: you can request only features within a bounding box, only features matching certain attribute values, or only specific fields. This makes WFS suitable for data integration and analysis workflows.
Example: A provincial government publishes its road network as a WFS service. A developer can query the WFS to retrieve only roads within a specific municipality, in GeoJSON format, for use in a routing application — without downloading the entire provincial road dataset.