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.
