Get to know SOLID in decentralized web in 5 Mins
What is SOLID?
SOLID is a shortened form of SOcial LInked Data which is a web decentralized project led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a director of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). SOLID is a concept that aims to improve the privacy of personal data using developing a platform for linked-data applications that are completely decentralized and fully under users’ control rather than controlled by other entities such as Google, Facebook, etc.
Let’s imagine… nowadays, every time we register a new account on a new platform, especially free platforms, Google, Facebook, and Spotify for example, we have no choice to reject terms and conditions to use these platforms. Every single time we use these platforms, we produce valuable data that might be beneficial for marketing. Moreover, our data scatter on many platforms. It, somehow, will be sold to other companies and analyzed to understand our behaviors in order to offer us services, products, or something else. As you can imagine, we are finally lost control of our data!
SOLID comes to deal with these problems. It gathers all our data into a single place that we can arbitrarily control — grant what and whom permission or revoke it at any time. This place is called Pod which is a single place of truth that can be held by either service providers or self-hosting. An example of the existing service providers is inrupt.com which is built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his dream teams. Let’s explore here.
How does it work?
Let’s consider the following properties:
- Identity: SOLID uses WebID is implemented by a unique identifier used to identify a specific user. It includes information to establish the identity of a user.
- Profile: A profile is the representation of a social agent’s identity in the Solid ecosystem. Profiles is a Resource Description Framework (RDF) document that is linked data. An RDF document describes the identity that can access by WebID.
- Authentication: Being a decentralized web application, it has a set of requirements for its authentication mechanisms. It requires cross-domain authentication by the competency of RDF which is linked data.
- Content: SOLID deals with 2 types of resources that are linked data (an RDF in form of JSON-DL, turtle, etc.) and everything else (binary or non-linked data)
What do they offer us?
- multiple applications access the same data: It means all platforms are up to date with just one time updating. It’s very easy!
- Switching between platforms: Just imagine you currently use Netflix, and you watched many genres of movies, series, TV shows, and so on, Netflix will learn and offer you personal watching lists. One day, you want to join Amazon Prime instead of Netflix because you found some interesting movies available only on Amazon Prime. With SOLID, Amazon Prime can immediately know which you watched and which not, then offer you personal interesting movie lists, not start from scratch like nowadays.
- Justice in data: SOLID also allows new joiner or startup applications to have the same set of users’ data to fairly compete using skills and ideas rather than data.
Risks of SOLID
A malicious person or application can copy our data and store it somewhere else. It means not only stealing our data but also the data is not up to date.
Show Cases
There are available applications built with SOLID
- Media Kraken: Tracking your movies
- Penny: A general Pod Browser by Vincent Tunru
- Liqid Chat: A message chat by Jackson Morgan
- Golf Companion Assistant: A game assistant under GNU Affero General Public License © 2020 Michaud
- Notepod: A note-taking application by Vincent Tunru
- PoPock: A pod management application based on webcomponents, vuejs, vue-bootstrap
- more and more
Currently, SOLID may need more time to develop workarounds or mechanisms to protect our data from malicious. Using SOLID, users should have personal privacy awareness, a basic understanding of technologies, and especially SOLID knowledge. Even though it’s very difficult to apply it to all departments in a country. However, personally, I strongly believe that it would be helpful if it is adapted to government systems such as tax declaration. With this, we can just upload all evidence to our pod and grant access to relevant departments once. All changes will be updated for every department. Economics is also a good fit to conform. I hope to see it soon.
Disclaimer — This article is prepared and accomplished by me in a personal capacity and only give you an overview of SOLID. The opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not reflect the view of any other ones. If there has anyone with an idea, opinion, or sharing, I am open to discussing more. Thanks.
