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.
Because applications are decoupled from the data they produce, users will be able to avoid vendor lock-in by seamlessly switching the 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.
Here are a few examples of prototype applications we have built using the Solid stack.
As the project director, but also as a web developer, Tim Berners-Lee is involved in the overall planning and evolution of Solid.
Lalana is the project manager, but she also keeps an eye on the research aspects of the project.
Amy was a PhD visiting student at MIT from the University of Edinburgh in 2015-2016. She lead the bridging of the Solid concepts with the W3C Social Web WG, and co-lead the development of the Linked Data Notifications (LDN) protocol.
Andrei was a researcher and developer for the Solid project. His time is spent between writing code and helping advance the Solid project.
Nicola is currently a PhD student at MIT, visiting Protocol Labs for a year from 2017-09. 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-lead the development of LDN and works on dokieli.
