Via post by Daniel Lewis, titled:10 Reasons to use OpenLink Data Spaces

There are quite a few reasons to use OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS). Here are 10 of the reasons why I use ODS:

  1. Its native support of DataPortability Recommendations such as RSS, Atom, APML, Yadis, OPML, Microformats, FOAF, SIOC, OpenID and OAuth.
  2. Its native support of Semantic Web Technologies such as: RDF and SPARQL/SPARUL for querying.
  3. Everything in ODS is an Object with its own URI, this is due to the underlying Object-Relational Architecture provided by Virtuoso.
  4. It has all the social media components that you could need, including: blogs, wikis, social networks, feed readers, CRM and a calendar.
  5. It is expandable by installing pre-configured components (called VADs), or by re-configuring a LAMP application to use Virtuoso. Some examples of current VADs include: MediaWiki, Wordpress and Drupal.
  6. It works with external webservices such as: Facebook, del.icio.us and Flickr.
  7. Everything within OpenLink Data Spaces is Linked Data, which provides more meaningful information than just plain structural information. This meaningful information could be used for complex inferencing systems, as ODS can be seen as a Knowledge Base.
  8. ODS builds bridges between the existing static-document based web (aka ‘Web 1.0‘), the more dynamic,  services-oriented, social and/or user-orientated webs (aka ‘Web 2.0‘) and the web which we are just going into, which is more data-orientated (aka ‘Web 3.0’ or ‘Linked Data Web’).
  9. It is fully supportive of Cloud Computing, and can be installed on Amazon EC2.
  10. Its released free under the GNU General Public License (GPL). [note]However, it is technically dual licensed as it lays on top of the Virtuoso Universal Server which has both Commercial and GPL licensing[/note]

The features above collectively provide users with a Linked Data Junction Box that may reside with corporate intranets or "out in the clouds" (Internet). You can consume, share, and publish data in a myriad of formats using a plethora of protocols, without any programming. ODS is simply about exposing the data from your Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 application interactions in structured from, with Linking, Sharing, and ultimately Meshing (not Mashing) in mind.

Note: Although ODS is equipped with a broad array of Web 2.0 style Applications, you do not need to use native ODS apps in order to exploit it's power. It binds to anything that supports the relevant protocols and data formats.