Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.
Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols.
At a glance, here is what Solid offers...
Users should have the freedom to choose where their data resides and who is allowed to access it. By decoupling content from the application itself, users are now able to do so.
Because applications are decoupled from the data they produce, users will be able to avoid vendor lock-in, seamlessly switching between apps and personal data storage servers, without losing any data or social connections.
Developers will be able to easily innovate by creating new apps or improving current apps, all while reusing existing data that was created by other apps.
The success of the Solid project has led to some new exciting developments to help it gain broad worldwide adoption.
We are pleased to note that a new start-up, Inrupt, Inc, will be putting its own effort into the Solid open source technology and the Solid movement.
Inrupt is building a commercial ecosystem to fuel Solid’s success and protect the integrity of the next phase of the web. Its mission is to restore rightful ownership of data back to every web user and unleash a new wave of innovation - for developers, for business, for everyone.
Read Tim's open letter to the community about Solid and Inrupt.
The best resource for all things Solid is now the Solid Community Site.
There you will find regular community updates, a wealth of developer resources, and general information about how Solid works.
Amy was a PhD visiting student at MIT from the University of Edinburgh in 2015-2016. She led the bridging of the Solid concepts with the W3C Social Web WG, and co-led the development of the Linked Data Notifications (LDN) protocol.
Dmitri was the lead developer for the JS-based Solid server, and he played an important role as our community manager. He was responsible for developing the OpenID COnnect (OIDC) authentication.
Nicola is currently a PhD student at MIT, visiting Protocol Labs for a year from September 2017. He was also a lead developer for the reference implementation of the Solid server.
Sarven was a PhD visiting student at MIT from the University of Bonn in 2015-2016. He co-led the development of LDN and works on dokieli.
