Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 1, 2014

Introducing OData

Filed under: Data — Patrick Durusau @ 5:55 pm

Introducing OData by David Chappell.

From the post:

Describing OData

Our world is awash in data. Vast amounts exist today, and more is created every year. Yet data has value only if it can be used, and it can be used only if it can be accessed by applications and the people who use them.

Allowing this kind of broad access to data is the goal of the Open Data Protocol, commonly called just OData. This paper provides an introduction to OData, describing what it is and how it can be applied. The goal is to illustrate why OData is important and how your organization might use it.

The Problem: Accessing Diverse Data in a Common Way

There are many possible sources of data. Applications collect and maintain information in databases, organizations store data in the cloud, and many firms make a business out of selling data. And just as there are many data sources, there are many possible clients: Web browsers, apps on mobile devices, business intelligence (BI) tools, and more. How can this varied set of clients access these diverse data sources?

One solution is for every data source to define its own approach to exposing data. While this would work, it leads to some ugly problems. First, it requires every client to contain unique code for each data source it will access, a burden for the people who write those clients. Just as important, it requires the creators of each data source to specify and implement their own approach to getting at their data, making each one reinvent this wheel. And with custom solutions on both sides, there’s no way to create an effective set of tools to make life easier for the people who build clients and data sources.

Thinking about some typical problems illustrates why this approach isn’t the best solution. Suppose a Web application wishes to expose its data to apps on mobile phones, for instance. Without some common way to do this, the Web application must implement its own idiosyncratic approach, forcing every client app developer that needs its data to support this. Or think about the need to connect various BI tools with different data sources to answer business questions. If every data source exposes data in a different way, analyzing that data with various tools is hard — an analyst can only hope that her favorite tool supports the data access mechanism she needs to get at a particular data source.

Defining a common approach makes much more sense. All that’s needed is agreement on a way to model data and a protocol for accessing that data — the implementations can differ. And given the Web-oriented world we live in, it would make sense to build this technology with existing Web standards as much as possible. This is exactly the approach taken by OData.

I’ve been looking for a more than an elevator speech but less than all the details introduction to OData. I think this one fits the bill.

I was looking because OData Version 4.0 and OData JSON Format Version 4.0 (OData TC at OASIS) recently became OASIS standards.

However you wish to treat data post-acquisition, as in a topic map, is your concern. Obtaining data, however, will be made easier through the use of OData.

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