The activity of this group is to apply Web standards to trusted read and write operations.
w3c-cg/rwwGroup's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
TPAC 2017 kicked off in California, achieving its highest attendance to date, with some saying it may have been the best TPAC ever. Extensive Strategic Highlights were also published.
HTML 5.2 is now a recommendation, with HTML 5.3 coming. Work on payments made progress with some demos presented at money 20/20. There was also a nice look ahead to 2018 and semantic web trends from Dataversity.
A slight pickup in activity this quarter in the community group. With around 75 messages, almost double the previous quarter. More details below.
Communications and Outreach
Aside from Fedora, there was some outreach this quarter with CERN, where it all began, with a view to possibly reuse Web Access Control.
By convention it’s been decided to try to add the ‘solid-app’ tag to new and existing apps for the solid platform, which will hopefully allow apps to become searchable. One new app, twee-fi, was written from scratch quite quickly and seems to work with all our servers. There is a general move to patch existing apps to follow this pattern so that both OIDC and TLS auth can be leveraged.
There have been updates to rdflib.js, solid-ui and solid-app-set. I also made a small console based playground, solid-libraries, that shows how these libraries fit together, and allows a few commands as examples. Additionally I have started trying to patch apps to use the new auth system starting with the pastebin tutorial. Hopefully more apps will be patched this quarter.
Last but not Least…
The OWL Time ontology is now a W3C REC. The ontology provides a vocabulary for expressing facts about topological (ordering) relations among instants and intervals, together with information about durations, and about temporal position including date-time information.
There was light discussion on the mailing list, however, there was also a major release of node solid server (4.0.0) which includes a new authentication method, WebID-OIDC.
Communications and Outreach
There was some outreach the folks at the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, and I’ll also be talking to the team from Remote Storage, about reusing JSON-LD as part of their model for reading and writing to the web with HTTP verbs.
Community Group
A quiet quarter in the Community Group tho Sebastian Samaruga has been investigating the idea of Semantic Business intelligence and has started a blog and codebase on the subject. There was also testing of the new version of node solid server with some success.
Applications
As mentioned above node solid server 4.0.0 now has WebID-OIDC support, N3 patches and many other features.
A new version of solid auth client was released in which will allow login via both TLS and OIDC.
It is possible to try out the latest version on the solid test server. Which will lead the user to a default set of apps, and a data browser which both read and write data, and has quite a few built in apps which are fired off depending on the (rdf) type of data being viewed.
ABAC (Attribute-based Access Controls) and the WebID+TLS+Delegation Protocol, existing open standards (such as TLS, HTTPS, URIs, and RDF) are leveraged to aid the development and deployment of new and more-agile services and solutions
This quarter kicked off with a full program at www 2017 in Perth and continued with ESWC which included an award winning paper on Linked Data Notifications.
Solid gain some traction this quarter going from 500 to 1500 stars on github, after a few articles publicized the protocol. Linked data continues to evolve in search with with google now including fact check data powered by schema.org.
A new proposal was also introduced called Linked Data Templates, which aims “to provide means to define read-write Linked Data APIs declaratively using SPARQL and specify a uniform interaction protocol for them”.
Communications and Outreach
Following the announcement of Linked Data Templates, there was an invitation to join the declarative apps community group, which some of us have. Please feel free to join this group and get involved with the evolution of read-write standards.
Community Group
This quarter saw the announcement and call for participation of Linked Data Templates, which interestingly is a protocol, neutral to transport method (HTTP, IPFS etc), however, the specification shall provide bindings for the HTTP protocol.
There was also an excellent blog post from Kingsley show casing a number of the technologies we’ve been looking at over the years, and demonstrating the openlink smart data bot.
Applications
Relatively quiet quarter for apps with much work being done on authentication. There was also the release of twinql, “A graph query language for the semantic web”. Work on updating libraries, rdflib, and servers, node solid sever have been bumped to the latest versions. There was work done on the solid connections ui, an application to manage the solid social graph.
And also the release of the Openlink Smart Data Bot, “Smart Agent that provides a single RESTful interface for interacting with a variety of Actions (operations) provided by APIs”.
Last but not Least…
Congrats to timbl on winning the Turing award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Computing, “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale”. An invention that continues to change all our lives, and hopefully one we can all help to bring to its full potential!
A quiet start to 2017 as people prepare for www 2017 and ESWC. An active political quarter saw the inauguration of a US new president, and numerous concerns raised about new laws regarding the privacy at the ISP level.
The Linked Open Data cloud continues to grow and has a neat update here. There has also been a release of the SHACL playground which allows data to be validated according to various “shapes“.
Linked Data Notifications has become a Proposed Recommendation, and will allow users of the web to have a data inbox, and enable a whole host of use cases.
Communications and Outreach
Collaboration has started to begun with two cloud providers, nextcloud and cozy cloud. Hopefully this will bring read and write web standards to a wider audience, over time.
Community Group
Some ideas for extending the way PATCH works has been described by TimBL. I found interesting the way data can be transmitted over other protocols than the web
– When clients of listening to the same resource are in fact located physically close, they could exchange patches through other medium like wifi or bluetooth.
– The system can evolve (under stress) to work entirely with distributed patches, making the original HTTP server unnecessary
– The patches could be combined with hashes of versions of folders to be the basis for a git-like version control system, or connect to git itself
Applications
There is a new test website for the openid authentication branch of node solid server and solid client has been updated to work with this. There have been various fixes to rdf and solid libraries, and two new repositories for solid notifications and solid permissions.
Good work has continued on rabel, a program for reading and writing linked data in various formats. In addition the browser shimmed apps on solid-ui, solid-app-set continue to improve. Finally, *shameless plug*, I am writing a gitbook on a skinned version of node solid server, bitmark storage, which hopes to integrate solid with crypto currencies, creating self funding storage.
Last but not Least…
On the topic of crypto currencies, I’m very excited about a draft paper released on semantic block chains. There was some buzz generated around this topic and hopefully will feature in a workshop next quarter.
An eventful 2016 draws to a close, steady progress has been made on standards, implementations and apps, for reading and writing to the web. Some press coverage is starting to emerge, with pieces on a decentralized web and putting data back in the hands of owners. Also published was a nice review and predictions for trends in 2017 on the (semantic) web.
Linked Data Notifications has become a Candidate Recommendation, and expected to become a full recommendation next year, as the working group has been extended slightly. Data Best Practices on the Web is also now a Proposed Recommendation.
In the community group a few apps were released and there was a renewed interest in WebID delegation, with a browser extension produced that allows one to delegate authentication to a trusted agent. I also put together a spec, library and implementation for dealing with GroupURIs.
Communications and Outreach
Some collaboration took place on the WebID front. There was also an innovative spec put together for working with X.509 fingerprints. There was also some inquiry of using WebID for cultural purposes with Drupal. And also an interest from divvy dao,qbix and others to implement Solid.
A browser extension has been published that allows WebID delegation to function native in the browser. One advantage of this is to make authentication systems a point of flexibility allowing login via password, oauth or other services to a delegated agent which can then be trusted via PKI.
I wrote a little spec regarding GroupURIs, which given a set of participants in a group, allows one to deterministically create a new URI for that group, that can be generated independently. This leads to the possibility of things like group chat rooms being created dynamically, I have an implementation and prototype of the spec also working, which allows you to create conference calls with people you know over webRTC.
Applications
A fair amount of work has been done refactoring and making production ready the main solid reference implementations. For example, the permissions module is now standalone, and both gold and node-solid-server now support WebID with delegation, with gold also offering a proxy server.
Work has continued on adding openid connect to solid and there is a live test server that is prototyping the new login flow. A new linked data server in perl has been written by kjetilk. The linked data document editor, dokie.li, continues to improve, and as promised here, is a screencast showing off the new features.
Last but not Least…
Linked Data Fragments has now come up with some impressive demos using the Triple Pattern Fragment technique. In addition to the endpoint on dbpedia, kudos to Ruben Verborgh who has published 25,000+ triples on his own site. And finally, an excellent integration with wikidata, viaf and dbpedia, all working in one browser, was created. Try it here!
The community group celebrates its 5th birthday this quarter. With almost 3000 posts (roughly 2 per day) from around 100 members a large number of topics have been raised, discussed and resolved. A bit thank you to to everyone that has been involved!
On the subject of statistics, there was a great paper produced by AKSW: LODStats: The Data Web Census Dataset which provides a comprehensive picture of the current state of a significant part of the Data Web. There was also a status update from the LDP Next Community Group and Data on the Web Best Practices is now a Candidate Recommendation.
TPAC 2016 got under way in Lisbon. While there was not a dedicated RWW session this year, many members of the group attended various related topics. There was some interest reported around the work on Verified Claims, which hopes to form a working group quite soon.
Communications and Outreach
Apart from TPAC, I was able to attend the 3rd annual Hackers Congress at Paralelni Polis, which aims to spread ideas of decentralization in technology. I was able to interact with some thought leaders in the crypto currency space and try to explain the decentralized nature of the web and how it can grow organically using standards to read and write. I also got a chance to talk to people form the remote storage project.
Community Group
Having reached the 5 year milestone, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on the direction of the community group. Do we want to keep going as we are, focus on specific topics, me more discussion oriented or more standards creation oriented? I’ll send out a questionnaire on this.
A thread on ways to (re) decentralize the web generated some discussion. There was also some discussion around the Internet of Things and a possible new framework for using Linked Data to read and write.
Applications
More work has been done in modularizing the solid linked data browser / editor into separate modular chunks (solid-ui, solid-app-set), that can be used to create apps on data, using a javascript shim. An analogy I like to think of is RSS being a structured data format but with some code it can become a useful application. Solid app set allows this to happen for any class of data. I am really enjoying this paradigm and have started to translate the apps I write. Here is an example of a playlist pane translation of a clients side app. Tim has written a lot more of these in the same repo.
Node solid server has progressed, with the permissions system being broken down into its own module, solid permissions. Also improvements have been made to the profile ui and the dashboard, which are still works in progress.
Much progress has been made on the document editor, dokie.li, which is now also driving the Linked Data Notifications spec towards Candidate Recommendation, and integrating with the Web annotations specs. An slightly older screencast of functionality is available here, but I am told new ones will also be published very soon.
Cognonto (a portmanteau of ‘cognition’ and ‘ontology’) exploits large-scale knowledge bases and semantic technologies for machine learning, data interoperability and mapping, and fact and entity extraction and tagging.
Check a sample term, or read more from this comprehensive blog post.
Decentralization is becoming more and more of a theme on the web, and this quarter witnessed the Decentralized Web Summit, in San Francisco. Keynotes from Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf are definitely worth checking out.
Some interesting work is coming up in as a verified claims working group has been proposed. The editors draft is available for review.
In the Community Group, there has been a some discussion, but main focus is on apps, and also a specification for linked data notifications has been started.
Communications and Outreach
Aside from the Decentralized Web Summit, some folks attended the ID2020 summit which aims to help provide legal identifiers to everyone by 2030. There was much interest there on the idea of decentralized identifiers.
A new spec has been created called “Linked Data Notifications“. The system combines the concept of an inbox with the idea sending notifications to users. Please feel free to take a look at this work, provide feedback or raise issues. Some light discussion on the mailing list and a few apps and demos have been released. More below!
Applications
Lots of application work going on in the solid and linkeddata github repositories. Solid.js has been renamed to solid client, and provides lots of useful features for dealing with solid servers.
The tabulator project has been modularized and split up into various components and apps (aka panes) so that anyone can build and skin a “data browser” capable of working together with web 3.0. Lots more interesting work in the individual repos.
I have done some work on the economic side release version 0.1 of webcredits, which provides a linked data based ledger for apps. A demo of the functionality built on top can be seen at : testcoin.org. Im also happy to report that I have got solid node server running on my phone and it performs really well!
Last but not Least…
Nicola Greco has collected a cool set of papers described as a “reading list” : of articles or papers relevant to the work of Solid. It is possible to drop your own paper in by adding a new issue. Happy reading!
The start of this year has seen a much the discussions on read write technology, move from the mailing list, to specific repos, issue trackers, and, particularly, gitter chatrooms. Most of the work that I have noticed has been focused around the Solid standard.
An interesting new Linked Data project called, GIESER, kicked off in March, described as, “an open cloud-based platform for integrating geospatial data with sensor data from cyberphysical systems based on semantic and Big Data technologies.” Openlink also announced the release of their JavaScript based RDF Editor.
Discussion in the group ticked up slightly, but most of work has been focused on implementations of servers, libraries and apps.
Communications and Outreach
The Qatar Research and Computing institute (QCRI) was paid a visit and continue to support the development of read and write standards on the web, particularly crosscloud and solid and their own app platform, meccano.
There was a successful hack day at MIT, and new interest in read write apps, with also a short tutorial used to show attendees how to write a pastebin app. For those interested in hacking on read write apps, please join us on gitter every Friday for a coding session, where we try to come up with new and interesting ideas.
Community Group
We welcome Dmitri Zagidulin to the group, who has started working full time with the team at MIT on Solid (and doing an amazing job!). On the mailing list, there was some discussion based around “Solid Cookies“, and about connecting two LDP servers together.
Applications
The Solid specification continues to improve, in order to cater for a growing set of applications. It has now been organized into a number of smaller self-contained specifications. Some work has been done on authentication, and discovery methods have been documented for inbox, storage and application type registries.
On the server side we have seen a lot of work go into maturing the javascript solid server, ldnode. And on the client library side solid.js has also added new features and documentation. In addition, a tutorial has been added for rdflib.js
Some new apps have been added, or started, mostly still in early stages. Two of the apps I created during hack days are, 2048, the popular puzzle game, and a simple markdown editor that saves files to Solid storage. Briefly, Zagel is the start of a chat app, work has begun on a Solid welcome app and a Solid Signup system has been created. More apps have been created in the form of, contactorator a contacts app, simple slideshow integrated into tabulator, errol which is notifications for Solid inboxes, midichlorian a tool for fetching files from Solid servers.
Last but not Least…
Interesting food for thought. Kuzzle describes itself as an :
open-source back-end solution for various applications. It combines a high level API, a database, a real-time engine, subscription and notification mechanisms as well as some advanced search features. The API is accessible through several standard protocols.
A quiet end to the year in terms of discussions, but lots of work going on in implementations. Perhaps this is a sign that read write standards for the web are entering a maturation process and 2016 will be a year of using them to see what they can do.
Many of the participants of this group attended TPAC 2015, in Sapporo Japan, and it was by all accounts it was a very exciting experience, with the W3C moving towards working groups in Payments, among other things. A good wrapup of W3C data activity included: data on the web best practices, spatial data and CSV.
Most of the activity I noticed this quarter was oriented towards the maturing Solid specification, which has been reorganized into logical sections (thanks Amy!) and I’ve presented is a small gitbook.
Communications and Outreach
Presentations on read write standards were given at the redecentralize conference. One video is available here and all the talks on the Solid platform are now in a github archive.
Community Group
A quiet quarter on the mailing list, as I think more people are devoting time to implementations, perhaps 2016 could be a good chance for feedback as to which items the group would like to focus on. There was also one interesting post on open badges.
Applications
Work on applications has picked up considerably this quarter, with much of the focus on client side javascript apps for the Solid platform. A great new library for building Solid apps is available now and called, solid.js. Additionally I have tried to put together some basic tutorials for getting started with apps.
Two great apps built using this library are called solid-inbox and plume. Solid-inbox is a tool to let you see the items in your “inbox” which is an area that users have designed for notifications. Plume, a pet blogging project, allows you to create rudimentary blogs on using Solid standards.
A new tool for writing Solid documents, dokie.li, is progressing well. Originally designed to author academic papers, it is becoming more generic to allow any kind of document to be authored using linked data.
Signup and identity providers have been improved and it is now possible to add your own identity provider to create a more diverse system of decentralized web identity. This can be done by running one of the Solid servers on your own machine, or by creating your own fork!
More great work from openlink in the form the structured data sniffer which turns much of the existing web into structured data.
I’ve been personally working on an proof of concept, alpha version of a social network that implements Solid called, solid.social. Some rough notes also accompany the site, that provide some screenshots and hopefully an idea of the direction things can go. Other than that, some basic command line utilities for reading and writing, were also written in the form of rdf-shell.
Last but not Least…
A new startup supporting decentralized read write technology co-operating systems was launched. From the site:
“We envision a web where we can use applications tailor-made for each of us. These applications will navigate linked data seamlessly across organisational boundaries. They will allow us to choose where to host our information, with whom we share it, and how we identify ourselves. This will create a distributed social web which will foster innovative ideas, help transform them into projects and allow us to share resources securely.”
A relatively quiet quarter in world of (read-write) web standards. Generally my impression is that the emphasis is shifting more towards implementation, with most of the hard parts of design out, now of the way. Andrei gave a great presentation at the re-decentralize web conference in Brazil.
There was quite a bit of discussion regarding decentralized identity, same origin policy and public / private key provisioning in the browser. In particular, the KEYGEN element was looked at, with some wanting to deprecate it. However, it was established that it’s still in use and would not be deprecated just yet, hopefully something better will soon be available.
More work this month on the SoLiD platform, apps (see below), some discussion on PKI, trust and reputation systems, on the web. MIT / Crosscloud are also going to continue their great work and announced they are hiring two developers. Please take a look if interested.
Communications and Outreach
There was some more discussions with the Social Web Working Group. There was great news as it was announced that Sarven Capadisli and Amy Guy would be joining MIT with some more good work in this area.
Community Group
The SoLiD framework now has it’s own logo and area on github. There was a short discussion regarding creating a decentralized a web of trust. Based on this I put together some tools to convert public keys between formats and use them to encrypt, decrypt and sign messages. We also started a wiki page for getting started with the SoLiD framework.
Applications
Some steady work this month on applications. To illustrate different aspects of development with the SoLiD platform I put together a short series of apps, each created in under 24 hours. The first was a hello world app, then a clipboard, a video display app, a simple chess game and a data explorer.
Lots of work was completed on ldnode,gold and rdflib. And also the start of an excellent realtime collaboration pad by timbl, which has turned out to be very useful already!
Last but not Least…
More great work from openlink as they prepare to release to production an excellent generic linked data document reader and editor. Feel free to give it a try, preferably using your own data space!
