(2009-11-18) Udell Odata Is Grease To Cut Data Friction

Jon Udell: OData is grease to cut data friction. Back in 2007 I talked with Pablo Castro about Astoria, which I described as a way of making data readable and writeable by means of a RESTful interface. The technology has continued to move forward, and I’m now a heavy user of one of its implementations: the Azure table store. Yesterday at PDC we announced the proposed standardization of this approach as OData, which InfoQ nicely summarizes here.

Nowadays I’m mainly a developer building a web service, and from that perspective it’s very clear that wide adoption of something like “ODBC for the cloud” is needed.

Open data on the web has enormous potential value, but if we have to overcome too much data friction in order to combine it and make sense of it, we will often fail to realize that value.