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)
  2. Content CRUD? (Create, Update, Delete) functionality including Optimistic Concurrency?
  3. Authentication
  4. 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

CategoryGlossary