Microsoft releases Astoria

"The goal of Astoria is to facilitate the creation of flexible data services that are naturally integrated with the web"

"In order for the system to understand and leverage semantics over the data that is surfacing, Astoria models the data exposed through the data service using a model called the Entity Data Model (EDM), an Entity-Relationship derivative. This organizes the data in the form of instances of "entity types", or "entities", and the associations between them." via e-science

It would be very interesting to see how researchers and scientists will use scientific data with Astoria...