The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a protocol which standardizes the exposure and consumption of data. In times where data is being exposed at high rates and where consumers connect to more and more data endpoints, it’s important for clients to access these endpoints in a common way. OData builds on standards like HTTP, Atom, and JSON to provide REST access to controller based endpoints. Data is exposed as entities where each entity can be treated as an Http resource which makes it subject to CRUD (create, read, update, delete) and Patch operations.
Atom is way to expose feeds much the same way RSS does. Atom by itself allows only feed exposure. If you want to publish data, AtomPub (Atom publishing) provides this ability. AtomPub uses HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to enable data publishing.
This is not an implementation to be used in every situation obviously. But it is an interesting flavor of having feed available data with real interaction.
