%VOSWARNING% %META:TOPICINFO{author="KingsleyIdehen" date="1149607168" format="1.1" version="1.1"}% ---++Google Data (GData) API Protocol GData is a new protocol created by Google that provides the following RESTful Web Services (meaning this serves consumer and provider applications): 1 Free Text (or Full Text) querying of content contained within a Data Space (an Atom-based implementation of the RSS-oriented OpenSearch API from Amazon) 1 Content [[CRUD]] (Create, Update, Delete) functionality including [[OptimisticConcurrency][Optimistic Concurrency]] 1 Authentication 1 Atom 1.0 Content Syndication ---++Google's Reasons for producing GData Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Making information accessible requires making it available in contexts other than a web browser. Thus, Google provides APIs to let client software request information outside of a browser context. GData provides a general model for feeds, queries, and results. You can use it to send queries and updates to any service that has a GData interface. Syndication is an effective and popular method for providing and aggregating content. GData provides a way to expand the types of content that Google can make available through syndication; in particular, it lets you use the syndication mechanism to send queries and receive query results. GData also lets you send data to Google, and update data that Google already has. ---+++References * [[http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/index.html#About][The Google Data API Specification]] CategoryGlossary