Use of WFS (Web Feature Service)

What does WMS do and how does it work?

Hi Samir,

Samir Haque said:

which is essentially has similar functionality to WMS but with simple vectors instead of rasters

with all respect to you and your knowledge, this statement is completely wrong, because WFS is very different in terms of data format, features and how the services are used!

WMS is not about rasters, despite of it's the most often used data format. WMS can provide data also as vectors (SVG) and even to provide information about an object parameters (attributes).

WFS is completely different (and far more complex) animal: It uses GML do describe GIS feature (geometry plus complete structure of attributes) and in contrast with WMS it allows to manipulate with features (modify, delete, create new ones).

Samir Haque said:

How many of you would like to see this in MicroStation?

What I see in real life is that MicroStation and solutions like Bm or ORD is loosing drastically in areas where spatial data are required (not only GIS, but also urban planning or civil), because of really poor support of OGC standards.

In my opinion critical areas / priorities are a bit different:

Lack of WMS-T support is a disaster. It was requested many years ago by a lot of users (I remember some discussions about this feature) and Bentley development has ignored this crucial feature constantly. I know about users that stopped to use Bentley products only becaues of this ignoring today world and today standards. As far as I know a lot of servers, state agencies and local authorities have started migration from WMS to WMS-T years ago, so some data now are available only as WMS-T and not as WMS. Such disadvantage can be easily a reason to leave Bentley product.

WFS would be nice, because today when data are vector, they are typically available through WFS ... but not at level how WFS is supported in Bentley Map, which is not good at all. I know servers (some really important) that can be used in any other solution (ESRI, open source...) but not in Bentley Map.

And simplified answer is "if you don't support INSPIRE (which Bentley has ignored for years), you will be out of bussiness in EU quickly" ... and INSPIRE is primarily about WFS an sometimes about WMS-T (but also about other OGC standards and formats).

With regarads,

  Jan

A response to this would help.

stuartw said:

What does WMS do and how does it work?

stuartw said:

What does WMS do and how does it work?

Wikipedia provides basic overview, specification is available here.

In "normal words", WMS defines format how to publish maps (typically raster, but the standard allows to use SVG also) using HTTP protocol.

It's the most simple way how to publish map data, on the other hand the functionality is quite limited (there is only one query feature and it's not usually supported). But because the standard is simple, many maps data worlwide are available in this format (e.g. in Czech Republic there are tens of WMS servers (cadastre, region authorities...) publishing several thousands of raster layers.

Regards,

  Jan

Hi Jan, thanks for your input! I tried to simplify the WFS description without getting into GML and uses cases that are not often used (WMS for vector data). AFA, WMTS (WMS-T) it is probably going to be available as a Limited Access feature in Update 11. We are actively developing it. For OGC compliance we are reviewing all of our requirements and making changes as needed to attain compliance.