The Solid project aims te redefine how data is shared on the web.
It’s an initiative by the inventor of the World Wide Web (and Linked Data): Tim Berner-Lee.
Solid has a couple of goals:
- Give peolpe more control over their data. With Solid, most of your data will live in your own pod, which is a personal server that could run in the cloud, or perhaps in your home.
- Make apps more interoperable. Break free from the data-silos and vendor lock-in that currently dominate our cloud-based apps. Since Solid decouples Data from Applications, you can use different apps with the same data, similar to how you can open a text file in multiple editors. This requires a high degree of standardization.
- Build upon existing web standards. Solid is powered by Linked Data, and uses many existing web standards like HTTP, RDF and SPARQL.
Ontola & Solid
As a company that has a strong focus on linked data, we’ve been involved with the Solid project for a couple of years now.
We’ve worked with Tim Berners-Lee himself on the RDFlib library, and we’re currently building a Solid Server called the DexPod, soon to be open sourced.
In 2021, we’ll be spending most of our time working on Solid related tech:
- Add full-text search to Solid (financed by NLNet). The aim is to make it compatible with most of the Solid servers.
- Enable web-payments in Solid, so people can easily monetize their data. Financed by Grant for the Web.
- Continue development on the DexPod
- Create tutorials to help developers getting started with Solid.
- Integrate Solid with our Argu e-democracy platform
Feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more, or collaborate!
