Open Data Formats for Life Science: RDF and OData

Preventing reinvention through precompetitive collaboration is a key goal of the Pistoia Alliance. Pistoia Alliance’s ELN query services project is working to create query standards that might be handled by existing services and protocols.

Many project teams seeking ways to expose data over the web. Unfortunately, our tendency is often to reinvent data formats to handle this—and these creations often are poor copies that lack functionality and fail to consider things like interface stability and extensibility. Many projects reinvent query interfaces to access the data, again poorly. 

But some standards exist that have thought through the issues associated with exposing data over the web. Two in particular are RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OData.  Both of these standards are gaining momentum in the industry, and with vendor support, these approaches provide the opportunity to seamlessly integrate data over the web without requiring our IT staff to write code to interface a data service and an application...