Edmonton Data Catalog Supported by OData
pnewhook
Just wondering who's looked at Edmonton's data site: http://data.edmonton.ca/
The data sets are good but the real gold mine is that they're
delovered by OData, which is a new data transfer protocol based on
AtomPub being developed by Microsoft (http://www.odata.org/)
One of the really cool things about OData is it can be consumed by
Excel, so non-programmers can leverage it.
The Edmonton site it amazing because it lets you create OData queries
in browser then look at thier result set in a really nice grid. Plus
it actually gives you some sample code in a bunch of languages.
The only downside to OData is while there plenty of free client
libraries (.Net, Javascript, PHP, Java) there's no open source server
implementation right now, so the cost to serve this kind of data is
non trivial. Hopefully, some open source implementations will come out
soon.
Love to hear the communities thoughts.
-Peter