Synergy - Project SOLID and SAFEnetwork

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UPDATE: I met Sir Tim Berners-Lee yesterday. We happened to be in the same area so he invited me to lunch so we could meet offline rather than just online as we have been recently - where he and others from the Solid community have been helping me get up to speed with their project and code.

Tim is the man who invented the Web and has been working on it for 25 years (remind you of anyone? :wink:), culminating in Project Solid (read/write Web, semantic data/documents with built in rules, forms etc)

It was fun, amazing for me to meet the man responsible for the birth of the Web, and to get to know him a bit personally. We talked about Solid and SAFE, but mostly about other things.

It was very helpful for me, to hear first hand what he regards as the stand out features of LinkedData. I’ve read about it but had missed some key features. Some points about LinkedData/RDF that I noted:

  • it’s a graph not a tree (unlike XML). I knew that!
  • can include rules (for transformation, validation?). Not that!
  • can include forms (so a client can create a form for the data in a document). Or this!
  • you can subscribe to documents (but not containers, as yet)
  • although you can represent RDF in XML and Json but I think going that route you tend to lose some of the features of LinkedData
  • adoption of LinkedData and using it to include semantics in documents is inhibited by the extra work involved, but schema.org has helped a lot (due to Google’s influence and the benefits in Internet search)

These features make all sorts of applications possible, including multiple views and styles of presentation of the data, as exemplified in the Tabulator (see end).

I’m continuing with work on a PoC demo to show that Solid apps can work with SAFE and will post updates here on that, also as I learn more about Solid. I have only scratched the surface, but it’s more and more impressive the more I learn about it, just like SAFEnetwork! :slight_smile:

[ASIDE: If you want to dig deeper into LinkedData, there is a paper about the Tabulator (see github README.md) which I think is a good place to look.]

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