A FeatureType is a a single concrete type of gml feature (as defined by an Application Schema .XSD). It is usually named with a "prefix:name" tag to uniquely identify it relative to other FeatureType names.

A FeatureType is often (but not always) synonymous with a dataset or layer. A dataset may contain multiple FeatureTypes - for example, the "City" dataset may contain "ny:Road" and "ny:Building" FeatureTypes.