The Open Data Protocol
This posts presents another initiative to open-up data sources by mean of standard Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON: the Open Data Protocol (OData).
OData (which seems to be mainly supported by Microsoft) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data. OData can be used to give access to a variety of sources, such as relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.
Georgi Kobilarov, the CEO of a German, Linked Data startup called Uberblic, issued an open challenge on his blog, asking: if we had a Web of Data, what would you build?
Here’s Georgi idea:
Here’s my idea: If we had a Web of Data, I would built an application for painless travel planning. It would integrate flight plans, train timetables, bus routes, car rental offers, etc. And the user would be able to just say: I want to go from A to B: Find me the best/cheapest/fastest routes.
ManyEyes is a IBM social networking application for data visualization, where one may share and visualize data sets via a social network.
With more than 20 data visualization types and more than 100.000 publicly available data-sets, ManyEyes is a remarkable example of generic data visualization techniques adapted to heterogeneous data sources. Moreover, the available data-sets can be downloaded and used as data sources for mash-up applications.
More information on ManyEyes can be found on the project Web site.
As an increasing number of organizations feels the need to open up their data for public usage, it also arises the need for tools able to unlock the intrinsic value of such data. Following a trend that already saw the creation of a public data search feature, Google Lab just launched the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool.
The New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority recently decided to release their transit data to the public. Examples of release data are about the subway, buses, railroads, etc.
The goal of MTA is to enable the creation of new mash-up services, such as the WayFinder Mobile Application for iPhone, an augmented reality application that has been designed to designed to help locating the nearest subway, bus or train stations.
Google Base is a free service for submiting all kinds of content for Google to host and to make searchable online. It allows content providers to upload structured data to Google, surface it across Google search properties, and syndicate it via apis, gadgets and gadget ads.
Using the Google Base Data API, developers can programmatically access Google Base. Here’s some of the things you can do:
copy right note: The content was cut and paste from http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/base/ for the only purpose to increase the awarness of Google Base Data API.
