How to prepare OData provider for child-parent relationship

Question

How an external data source of type OData, V2 AtomPub format, should be prepared in order to support the child-parent relationship in SF. The JSON response contains

__metadata": {
                "id": "https://xxx:443/odata/Kitten(1L)",
                "uri": "https://xxx:443/odata/Kitten(1L)",
                "type": "default.Kitten"
            },
"CatDetails": {
                "__deferred": {
                    "uri": "https://xxx:443/odata/Kitten(1L)/KittenFood"
                }
            }

When the Kitten external object is inspected in Salesforce, there is no explicit field that reference the Cat object in Kitten object. Do I need to ask my BE developers to define an explicit field in Kitten DTO that will reference a Cat DTO and manually define the lookup from Kitten to Cat. May be also an issue how OLino lib is used (Spring Boot is used in BE).

There was a related thread in https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/?id=906F00000005HIkIAM but not sure whether the feature is supported since 2015.