Subject: [gaia] Tim Berners-Lee new project Solid

From: Richard Dent <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2015 16:58:42 +0000

https://www.csail.mit.edu/solid_mastercard_gift

*"Specifically, the gift will help him and his team develop technologies 
for “Solid <https://github.com/solid/>,” a system for building 
decentralized social applications using what the researchers call a 
“linked-data” platform. Solid is customizable and easy to scale, relying 
as much as possible on existing web <http://www.w3.org/>standards. Like 
multiuser applications, applications on Solid talk to each other through 
a shared filesystem – and, in this case, that filesystem is the entire 
World Wide Web.*

*"Right now we have the worst of both worlds, in which people not only 
cannot control their data, but also can’t really use it, due to it being 
spread across a number of different silo-ed websites,” says Berners-Lee. 
“Our goal is to develop a web architecture that gives users ownership 
over their data, including the freedom to switch to new applications in 
search of better features, pricing, and policies.”*

*In contrast with cloud-storage companies like Dropbox and Google Drive, 
Solid <mailto:https://github.com/solid/>doesn’t own each user’s data. 
And unlike other emerging open-source efforts like OwnCloud 
<https://owncloud.org/>, Solid <mailto:https://github.com/solid/>offers 
a generic platform on which developers can build virtually any kind of 
application."*

-------------------------
PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of Cambridge

www.openaccessphd.com
@richarddent
Tel: 07827 537537