The same principles that guide service-oriented architecture (SOA) for application development can be applied to providing a loosely coupled approach to data access, says Anne Thomas Manes, research director at the Burton Group Inc.

In an existing SOA environment the data services approach can provide business users with access to a large variety of information stored in everything from legacy flat files to desktop spreadsheets, she explained in a Burton teleconference on Tuesday.

"One of the features of the data services approach is that it allows loosely coupled access to data for a large variety of clients," Manes said. "Basically anything that can access a service will be able to access this data."