There is a vast amount of data available today and data is now
being collected and stored at a rate never seen before. Much, if
not most, of this data however is locked into specific applications
or formats and difficult to access or to integrate into new
uses.
Public data is often unfortunately held private or needlessly
buried behind random, inefficient, and cumbersome interfaces.
Open Data is a general movement for all types of data,
scientific or other, enabling data to be accessible
programmatically for public or commercial use.
The Open Data Protocol (OData) provides a way to unlock your
data and free it from silos that exist in applications today,
making it easy for data to be shared in a manner that follows the
philosophy of Open Data. OData enables a new level of data
integration across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and
tools.
The new odata.org web site is your one-stop shopping for all
things related to OData, including:
- The OData SDK, including
sample OData services, client libraries for most platforms, server
libraries for the .NET Framework and great samples.
- A great overview of the OData
protocol, both from the technology and the scenario points of
view, as well the official specifications themselves.
- A comprehensive set of articles
on how to get started with OData across platforms and
languages.
- A representative set of OData
producers for you to use to test your client-side tools and to
get a feel for the range of uses that OData supports.
- A bunch of OData consumer tools and
technologies for you to use against existing OData producers or
your own new ones.
- The OData blog manned by the Microsoft Data
Services team and containing OData-related articles and links for
OData everywhere.
- A growing list of Frequently Asked Questions
about OData-related tools and technologies.
Another key goal of this site is to foster the OData
community, and to be as open and responsive to community
suggestions as possible. To make this a reality we plan to create
and host:
- A Mailing list and archive.
- A publically editable Wiki.
But we want your opinion, is this the right thing to
do?
At the same time we are looking to engage with IETF and W3C to
explore how to get broader adoption of the OData extentions
& conventions.
If you have any ideas please leave a comment or send us your feedback.
