An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
The pre-millennial vision of the Internet becoming an open global forum for democratizing information and communication seems to have gone the way of the dodo, with a few extremely powerful players now centralizing the aggregation and control of most user traffic, applications and data in walled commercial and government silos.
Fortunately there’s a project called Solid seeking to hit the refresh button on the original vision of a decentralized semantic web. This isn’t a new blockchain/crypto project seeking a critical mass of users, as it uses the web (i.e. HTTP, URLs, etc.) as its backbone.
Solid is a coming together of academics from MIT, commercial developers, open source contributors, and some of the foundational thought leaders of the W3C, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself. The goal is to represent applications, data and entities as peer nodes servers on the Internet, and instantly able to address each other using semantic commands, while preserving total permissioned privacy and user control over sharing.
“Solid is ready now because it’s basically the next read/write version of the web, which has been in development and testing for 30 years,” said Justin Bingham, CTO of Janeiro Digital and a key contributor to Inrupt, the ecosystem arm of the Solid project. “We all want to be able to do more with our data, while giving less control to the businesses using that data.”
The open-source collaborative project allows interested users and businesses to create their own “pods,” which are uniquely identifiable, URL-addressable and semantically aware virtual web servers. Pods can reach fast consensus with each other through a unique, high performance graph-based database.
©2019 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. At the time of this writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
