Douglas Purdy

"What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet." – Romeo and Juliet

Our team did a lot of work prior to and during PDC to ensure that we were clearly explaining the value of the data & modeling technologies we are delivering for customers.

One of the things that we really want to get clear was the value of the ADO.NET Data Services protocol, independent of our .NET implementation. 

This was especially important to do as we are folding much of the protocol implementation into WCF proper which will enable WCF Core Services and WCF RIA Services to implement the protocol as well (this resulting in us renaming ADO.NET Data Services to WCF Data Services).

In addition, it was very hard to talk about SharePoint, Excel, etc. implementing the “ADO.NET Data Services Protocol” – as many of us on the team can attest.

Lastly, we believe that this protocol gives us, our customers, and even our competitors an opportunity to unlock data sources throughout the enterprise and the Internet.

The most notable example of this is the “Dallas” service we announced at PDC.

The name “ADO.NET Data Services Protocol” got in the way of explaining this opportunity.

As such, we decided to give a name to the protocol – Open Data Protocol or OData for short.

We had already documented the protocol fully, but this naming event gave us the perfect opportunity to do two other things:  release the protocol specification under the OSP and start a conversation with the community about rolling the features of the protocol into AtomPub or other appropriate standards.

The name landed in the nick of time for PDC, so we are still getting all of our resources lined up behind the new name.

You can read an overview at odata.org, which we’ll be updating with more material soon.

Based on the reaction that we got at PDC, all three moves (the rename, the OSP, and the promise of community engagement toward standardization) was very welcomed and the promise seemed clear to everyone I spoke with.

As Jon Udell says, “OData is grease to cut data friction”.

One of the things that I am most excited about is the opportunity for this protocol (and whatever evolves out of the engagement with the community) to be used as the the basis on the “InfoBus”.

Pablo Castro (we call him Mr. OData now) is going to take point on our engagement with the community and you’ll be hear more from him soon (we are all taking a little break from the run-up to PDC right now).