Solid A Platform for Decentralized Social Applications Based on Linked Data
This paper presents Solid, a decentralized platform for social Web applications. In Solid, users' data is managed independently of the applications that create and consume this data. The user's data is stored in a Web accessible personal online datastore (or pod) Solid allows users to have one or more pods from different pod providers, while at the same time enabling users to easily switch between providers. Developers can use Solid protocols, which is based on existing W3C recommendations, for reading, writing and access control of the contents of users' pods. In Solid architecture, applications can operate over data owned by the user or the user has access to regardless the location of this data on the Web. Users can also control access to their data, and have the option to switch between applications at any time. This is paradigm shift in integrating social features into Web applications. Our new paradigm produces a novel line of social applications. We have used Semantic Web technologies to build Solid prototypes, allowing us to demonstrate its utility through a set of applications for common day to day tasks. We also conduct experiments to show the scalability of the Solid prototypes.