OGC Web Feature Service (WFS)

The OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) defines an interface that allows a client to retrieve and update features of georeferenced data. The main difference between WMS and WFS is that WFS gives direct access to the geometry and the attributes of a selected geospatial data, meaning that a user can work with a dataset provided by WFS. In brief, the WFS is the specification to access vector datasets.

OGC Web Feature Service specification: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wfs