The Aspiration of ODOS

The ODOS here is pronounced oh-dee-oh-es, not oh-dos.

If you search “Open Data for Open Science” on the internet, you will see that this phrase has been a moniker for a series of events Microsoft has produced since early 2011. You will also see that a permanent agenda item for all these events is the Open Data Protocol, OData.

OData is an open Web protocol from Microsoft for querying and updating data. As more and more Microsoft products and technologies are becoming part of the OData ecosystem, we believe that OData can be equally powerful for building solutions to data-intensive science problems. What we really want to do is to use OData to promote and support open science, thus Open Data for Open Science, in short, ODOS.

If you look into our ODOS events on the Web, for example, the ODOS2012 workshop, ODOS Beijing, and ODOS Australia, you will see that they are designed to enable mind-swaps between two distinguished groups of people: experts who create data tools at Microsoft and scientists who need tools to solve their data problems. OData is one of many cutting-edge software technologies we showcase with scientific use scenarios. Do you have a data problem that you may challenge us to create an open solution with you?