Douglas Purdy

I am spending a lot of time on the Open Data Protocol (OData).

Many of us at Microsoft that believe that this protocol can help usher in a more open and programmable Web.

A protocol like this is a prerequisite for the broader “Infobus” and “Information Liberation” vision that I often talk about.

Envision a world where every application/Web property exposes its data (actually your data) in a way that you can easily query it in rich tools like Excel/Numbers or write your own mash-up/custom application.

A world were government data is transparent, queryable and accessible to any citizen.

A world where you can you can ask a question and know: “There’s a feed for that”.

We are just starting, but we (Microsoft) already has an impressive list of OData producers/consumers coming online (including SharePoint, SQL Server 2008, IIS/ASP.NET, etc.) and there are more in the pipeline that we will announce this year.

We are working as hard as we can to get OData support on as many platforms (both client and server/service) as we can, so a developer on any platform can both consume and produce these feeds.

We are begin to engaging partners, consumers and even competitors in a more structured way to see how we can work together to build up an ecosystem of open data services.

To make this vision a little more concrete, let’s look at a couple of screenshots.

Below is a third-party tool called LinqPad.  LinqPad recently added support for OData, which is demonstrated below.  The most interesting thing is the data service that I am accessing.  The City of Edmonton, Canada is exposing datasets as OData feeds at http://data.edmonton.ca/.  That lets tools that understand OData, like LinqPad, access this information in rich ways.

Also, notice the two other data services in the tool.  These point to District of Columbia and New America Foundation data at http://ogdisdk.cloudapp.net/.

This next screenshot is of Excel (via the PowerPivot plug-in) accessing the same data service.

Just to prove that this is all open, accessible and available to non-Microsoft clients/tools, see the below.  This is the same query that we are executing in LinqPad, but in Chrome and on the address bar.

Of course, you can access all this information using PHP, Java, JavaScript or .NET language using our OData clients.

Further, we are beginning to have conversations with key technical leaders in other companies/organizations about adding support in other platforms/languages/products.

We are excited about the possibilities here and think there is a real opportunity to usher in a world where open data is not only possible, but pervasive.