There are many requests that can be made to a OWS service.One of the most fundamental is getCapabilities, demonstrated with the httr package to show how API queries can be constructed and dispatched, in this case to discover the capabilities of a service providing run by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO):

Data can be downloaded from WFS services with the request and a specific typeName (as illustrated in the code chunk below).

Note the use of to ensure that the results are written to disk rather than loaded into memory, allowing them to be imported with sf.This example shows how to gain low-level access to web services using httr, which can be useful for understanding how web services work.For many everyday tasks, however, a higher-level interface may be more appropriate, and a number of R packages, and tutorials, have been developed precisely for this purpose.

There is much more to learn about web services and much potential for development of R-OWS interfaces, an active area of development.For further information on the topic, we recommend examples from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) services at and reading-up on OCG Web Services at opengeospatial.org.