This International Standard specifies the behaviour of a web feature service that provides transactions on and access to geographic features in a manner independent of the underlying data store. It specifies discovery operations, query operations, locking operations, transaction operations and operations to manage stored parameterized query expressions.

Discovery operations allow the service to be interrogated to determine its capabilities and to retrieve the application schema that defines the feature types that the service offers.

Query operations allow features or values of feature properties to be retrieved from the underlying data store based upon constraints, defined by the client, on feature properties.

Locking operations allow exclusive access to features for the purpose of modifying or deleting features.

Transaction operations allow features to be created, changed, replaced and deleted from the underlying data store.

Stored query operations allow clients to create, drop, list and describe parameterized query expressions that are stored by the server and can be repeatedly invoked using different parameter values.

NOTE This International Standard does not address the access control issues.

This International Standard defines 11 operations:

— GetCapabilities (discovery operation);

— DescribeFeatureType (discovery operation);

— GetPropertyValue (query operation);

— GetFeature (query operation);

— LockFeature (locking operation);

— GetFeatureWithLock (query and locking operation);

— Transaction (transaction operation);

— CreateStoredQuery (stored query operation);

— DropStoredQuery (stored query operation);

— ListStoredQueries (stored query operation);

— DescribeStoredQueries (stored query operation).