An abstraction for rich data access for consumers of a service in a service oriented system. The abstraction is created by the author of a service which owns the data, and includes a number of service-public properties and associations. Further, the abstraction can contain metadata and logic that provides for a rich, interactive experience for the consumer interacting with the data encapsulated by the entity agent. These can include verifying that the data conforms to the contract published by the owning service, validating and defaulting properties, and validating associated data. Also the abstraction can contains metadata and logic for transmitting of the data back to the owning service and optionally saving to the local data store of the consumer.