The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) developed the Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) specifications to facilitate the interoperability of geospatial data.
A WMS produces an image (e.g. PNG, JPG) of geospatial data. The WMS protocol is defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
A WFS delivers all the geospatial data in XML format.
OGC Web Services give clients access to our data without having the dataset locally. Using a specially structured http request, clients can call a dataset (eg. coastline) into their application (online or from some GIS) via our website.