Occasionally there are things that I read about on the web which happen to fit perfectly with some need I have at the time: and “Open Data Protocol”, or just oData, is one of them. I think I got hip to this by reading Miguel’s post on oData, but looking around it has been mentioned in a few other blogs I follow. What is oData? Put simply, it’s a bit like being able to do SQL queries over the web – for non-technical people it’s deeply disinteresting, but what it effectively promotes is an ability for web-based services to open access to their databases in a pretty straightforward and standards-compliant method.

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