White Area lecture on the CERN-Solid collaboration

Overview

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (TimBL) announced his Solid project (Social Linked Data) in 2016.
This Open Source platform aims to re-decentralize the Web and empower users’ control over their own data.
Solid includes standards, missing from the original Web specifications, giving back to the users:
- ownership of their data, private, shared, and public.
- choice on the storage where these data reside and
- control over who has access to them.
TimBL co-founded inrupt to implement the Solid standards.

CERN is the birthplace of the Web
Many sophisticated software projects at CERN
- Already open source
- Operational status (tens of thousands of users)
Solid is here to stay - we should be more actively involved than we were with W3C.

People store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. (*)
Pods are like secure personal Web servers for data.
Solid connects resources in different pods by representing all data as Linked Data, i.e. every piece of data gets its own HTTP URL on the Web, and we use those URLs to refer to this data.
When data is stored in someone’s pod, they control who and what can access it.
There will be a pod demo by Jan.

(*) Pod: a usually protective container or housing (from the Webster dictionary).

Node Solid Server (NSS): Open Source server by the MIT Solid team since 2016. NSS instances in the next slide.
Enterprise Solid Server (ESS): inrupt’s commercial Closed Source alternative, based on Trellis. Launched in November 2020. Article.
Community Solid Server (CSS): Open Source project by Ghent University, paid for by inrupt, to rewrite NSS from scratch in TypeScript.
php-solid-server (PSS): Open Source, good test results, under dev. The basis for the Nextcloud app that makes Nextcloud compatible with Solid.

All Solid servers have the same common interface, so they don’t need to know anything about what apps are being run on them. See more here
Two public demo/test sites for making your own pod. They both run NSS:
- inrupt.net run by inrupt, hosted at inrupt premises, USA, data in Amazom Web Services.
- solidcommunity.net run by the Solid organisation, hosted in the UK, data in Digital Ocean.
- a few others people show at the monthly Solid World Webinar.

Slide with input from TimBL

Recently matured, they cover areas of:
* Authentication
* Authorisation
* Data inter-operability
* Testing suites

As the Web Access Control (WAC) gives all privileges to the user,
Access Control Policies (ACP) are now being defined to assist newcomers.
Specs’ current location: https://solid.github.io/specification/
Specs’ future location: https://solidproject.org/TR/
Test suite: https://github.com/solid/test-suite

By start-up companies and government agencies. Most engaged countries, so far, are Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK.

Activities summarised in the Solid newsletter and reported at the monthly Solid World Webinar.

Hosted: *DigitalOcean (UK) , **AWS (USA)
WebID: ***username will be part of your WebID

Mutual benefit will derive from other PoCs with:

The CERN Notifications project, unilateral, via subscription and archived.
The new CERN Authentication project.
CS3MESH, a pan-European cross-institution mesh that will offer data sharing/co-editing facilities, relying on the federation of different sites by using well-known APIs.
InvenioRDM, a Research Data Management, open source platform for persistent paper & data registration.

For Jan’s MSc thesis at itu.dk to demonstrate that the implementation works.
For CERN to be inspired by the PoC and embrace Solid.
- Solid is there to stay. We should embark now!
For Solid to show that its principles can work in an environment of tens of thousands of users.

To TimBL for always giving advice, despite the millions who contact him.
To Michiel de Jong & Sarven Capadisli, for their answers to our frequent questions.
To Jan Schill (from Maria) for choosing this project for his MSc thesis.
To the CERN/IT-CDA management for approving this work.