The elmcity service connects to a half-dozen other services, including Eventful, Upcoming, EventBrite, Facebook, Delicious, and Yahoo. It's nice that each of these services provides an API that enables elmcity to read their data. It would be even nicer, though, if elmcity didn't have to query, navigate, and interpret the results of each of these APIs in different ways.
For example, the elmcity service asks the same question of Eventful, Upcoming, and EventBrite: "What are the titles, dates, times, locations, and URLs of recent events within radius R of location L?" It has to ask that question three different ways, and then interpret the answers three different ways. Can we imagine a more frictionless approach?
I can. Here's how the question might be asked in a general way using the Open Data Protocol (OData):
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