02/05/2020

Solid & the Decentralized Web

  1. What is the Solid Project ?


    Well first,
    there are lot of things whose name is Solid on the net, and in computer programming too...
    but the one we will discuss here is the project launched by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the man known as the inventor of web in 1989).

    Sure that it's hard to say one man invented the web, as there was many people that worked on it, but Tim wrote an important part to describe all you use each day.

    Working at CERN, he proposed some tools to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers, by making first HTML pages, & describing how the links works...

    His goal was to provide each person a way to share what information he want.

    From this time, its "invention" has been reused a lot until now and many businesses use it...

    BUT,
    as anyone knows, some companies use those technologies, but the user is not the owner of its data. Those companies uses your data, to show you ads that could interest you, sell your data...


    As the director of the W3C consortium, Tim always applied to provide ways to share informations and to connect (LinkedData) them and now he want to revert the tendance.

    The goal of Solid is to give back to each one a way to manage its data, to decide who he want to share one part of information.

    To do that, Tim created the company Inrupt to help the Solid Project.

    To know more about the Solid philosophy, check the Wikipedia page [ English ] [ French ]
    or the SolidProject
    an old page describing the Solid project


    The Community Forum is a good start and the newcomers are always welcomed to ask questions and
    more technical question can also be asked on gitter/Solid/chat
  2.  How Solid Works ?

    Building apps on Solid is really different as building apps in other ways. Whereas in current ways, data or information are stored in databases.
    In the Solid philosophy, each user store its data on a POD and authorize apps to read its data or not.
    For example, we could imagine a service provider that