Open Query Standards: A Pistoia signpost and webinar

Preventing reinvention through precompetitive collaboration is a key goal of the Pistoia Alliance. So imagine my surprise when, as chair of the technical committee, I discovered that the first phase of the Pistoia Alliance’s ELN query services project was working to create query standards that might be handled by existing services and protocols.

All of our companies can probably cite examples of 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. Furthermore, we also reinvent query interfaces to access the data, again poorly. I’ve done this myself, and so have others just within my own company.

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...