The 3D City Database comes with an OGC compliant implementation of a basic Web Feature Service (WFS) allowing web-based access to the 3D city objects stored in the database. WFS clients can directly connect to this interface and retrieve 3D content for a wide variety of purposes. The WFS provides a standardized and open interface for requesting geographic features across the web using platform-independent calls. Rather than sharing geographic information at the file level, the WFS offers fine-grained access to geographic information at the feature and property level. Web feature services allow clients to only retrieve or modify the data they are seeking, rather than retrieving a file that contains the data they are seeking and possibly much more.

The 3D City Database WFS interface is implemented against the latest version 2.0 of the OGC Web Feature Service standard (OGC Doc. No. 09-025r2) and hence is compliant with ISO 19142:2010. The implementation currently satisfies the Simple WFS conformance class. An implementation of a full, transactional WFS is commercially available from the development partner virtualcitySYSTEMS.

3DCityDB comes with Docker support, i.e. the 3DCityDB and the WFS can be operated from within Docker containers. Instructions on how to run the WFS as a Docker container are given here.