Momentum Grows as OData v4 Achieves Standards Milestone

OData Industry Adoption Builds with v4 Now in Public Review in OASIS

Based on the industry collaboration between Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Progress Software, SAP AG, WSO2, and others, we are pleased to report that the OASIS OData Technical Committee recently approved Committee Specification Draft 01 (CSD01) of OData version 4.0 and has initiated a public review of OData v4.0 during May 3, 2013 through June 2, 2013. OData v4.0 is expected to become an OASIS Standard in 2013.

Much of the data on the Web today lives in silos, needing different protocols, APIs, and formats to query and update the data. With the rapid growth of online information and big data sources, open data protocols and services are in demand more than ever before.

OData is a Web protocol for querying and updating data. OData is built on a set of RESTful conventions that provide interoperability for services that expose data. It builds on standardized web technologies such as HTTP, REST, Atom/XML, and JSON. It provides an entity data model and has support for vocabularies for common ontologies such as Sales (with Customers, SalesOrder, Product, ...), Movies (with Title, Actor, Director, …), or Calendars (with Event, Venue, …), etc. OData enables the creation of REST-based data services which means that resources identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and defined in an Entity Data Model (EDM), can be published and edited by Web clients using simple HTTP messages.

The OASIS OData version 4.0 specification is based on the popular OData version 3.0. OData version 4.0 defines data model changes to significantly simplify and expand how relationships are expressed and used as well as how metadata is described and partitioned, expanded query capabilities for inline collections and fulltext search, and extended functionality for change tracking and asynchronous processing.

The OASIS Technical Committee has produced three work products; OData version 4.0 defines the core semantics and facilities of the protocol, including a set of conventions for addressing resources, query string operators for querying a service, and an XML representation of the Entity Data Model exposed by an OData service. OData JSON Format version 4.0 defines representations for OData request and response bodies using a JSON format. OData Atom Format version 4.0 defines an equivalent representation for OData request and response bodies using an Atom/XML format.

Many organizations are already working with OData, and it has proven to be a useful and flexible technology for enabling interoperability between disparate data sources, applications, services, and clients. Here are some recent examples:

• SAP have published the initial contribution of their OData Java library to GitHub - https://github.com/SAP/cloud-odata-java. SAP has a strong interest in OData and you will find it utilized across many of their platforms and services.
• Earlier this year, SAP gave a presentation on their open source OData Eclipse Plugin at EclipseCon. The presentation describes the OData service creation, and discusses how the service can be consumed from a lightweight Java-based (Android) application - OData Unleashed! Let’s Learn How to Exploit It (Presented by SAP)
• Flatmerge recently added OData output to their current output formats of plain XML and JSON - Get OData Output from Flatmerge
• JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to work with data APIs including OData. They recently published a Blog Calling OData actions and service operations with JayData.
• Earlier this month, the White House released an executive order on open data Making Open & Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information. The folks at Layer 7 published a Blog discussing how to open up government data with OData Making Government Data “Easy to Find, Accessible & Usable”.

Microsoft Research Explores OData and the Semantic Web

Microsoft Research (MSR), in collaboration with The British Library and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), has just published a whitepaper Linking Structured Data that explores how OData can be used to expose data within an RDF triple store through an end-user oriented model, and consumed by a broad range of consumer-oriented tools and applications. To better understand how RDF data could be exposed and consumed by OData clients in a real world example, MSR went from theory to practice by focusing on some scenarios from The British Library which publishes its metadata on the Web according to Linked Data principles.

Join the OData Community

If you’re interested in using or implementing the OData protocol or contributing to the OData standard, now’s the time to get involved .

• Learn more about OData and the ecosystem of open data producer and consumer services by visiting the recently revamped OData.org web site for information, content, videos, and documentation.
• Get the latest information for what's going on in OData by join the OData.org mailing list.
• Get involved in the #OData discussion and contribute to the OData community.
• Join the OASIS OData technical committee (OData TC) to contribute to the standard.
• Send comments on OData version 4.0 to the OASIS OData Technical Committee

We’re looking forward to continued collaboration with the community to develop OData into a formal standard through OASIS.

Mark Gayler, Senior Technical Evangelist
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Ram Jeyaraman, Senior Standards Professional
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. and co-Chair of the OASIS OData Technical Committee