Solid World 2020-11-05 notes === **Summary** The _Solid World_ monthly events are very useful. As Gitter chats are too busy and go to all directions, these video meetings are the best way to understand what is in focus now. This month’s agenda is all about delivering Solid on a national scale, with a special focus on current activity in Belgium. We’ll hear from a number of presenters involved in tech infrastructure, solution development, and service deployment. Material from this webinar will be available via https://solidproject.org/events. For full names and affiliations of the regular speakers, please see the notes of previous such webinars from the [CERN-Solid collaboration index](https://indico.cern.ch/category/11962/). ### Solid Roadmap update **TimBL:** Thanks to _Mitzi László_, who moves on to a new professional path. Thanks to _Justin Bingham_ [(see here notes on his past presentation)](https://codimd.web.cern.ch/IXzpKjBrSeqTUCPSJwjs4w#Justin-Bingham-amp-Josh-Collins---Genetic-Digital) who fixed the glitch of the Enterprise Solid Server (ESS). **Ruben:** Ruben and TimBL had a meeting with the government of Flanders in Belgium for an event where the official government policy in favour of Solid solutions for the public administration applications was confirmed. Ruben reported that the Community Solid Server (CSS) is now able to write files to disk, as the default should be. He made a demo, where different URIs correspond to different storage locations. One can give access to _a file local to his/her pod_, via the browser to other users, always under his/her Access Control. File extension **.ttl** can contain various filetypes for display via the browser. TimBL suggests to **check [the data kitchen](https://github.com/solid/data-kitchen)** on how to share your local files on your pod with those _you_ authorise to see them. See [here more info on CSS](https://github.com/solid/community-server-demos). **Oz:** Several enhancements were added to the Web Access Control (WAC) model of the Enterprise Solid Server (ESS), to satisfy many such requests. The inrupt dev. team is now working on Access Control _Policies_ (ACP). All tools will work with both CSS and ESS, provided they are compatible with the Solid specifications. ### “My Citizen Profile” demo — Frederic Hennequin, Flanders Government _Bio: Frederic Hennequin is the Solution Architect for the Citizen Profile and Webplatform program of Agentschap Informatie Vlaanderen._ The application, today beta, gives to every citizen an aggregated view of all government files that contain his/her data. The Solid advantage is that data can be re-used across government applications. Access to the app is done via the Solid pod browser. ### Building a job vacancy application on top of Solid — Pieter Heyvaert, imec _Bio: Pieter Heyvaert is a development lead and developer advocate at Ghent University - Internet and Data Lab (IDLab), imec. He obtained the degree of Doctor of Computer Science Engineering in 2019 from Ghent University, after obtaining the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science Engineering in 2014 at the same university. His interests are in the scope of the Semantic Web. More specific, his PhD research focused on improving the effectiveness of the creation and execution of knowledge graph generation rules. He contributed to more than 25 publications, including papers at international conferences and articles in international journals. Furthermore, he's keen on deploying Semantic Web technologies in his own side projects, such as the websites that he develops and the datasets that he publishes._ The application takes care of people with dyslexia or dyscalculia, who apply for a job. In the framework of the _City of People_ initiative, the app has a very helpful user interface, a functional navigation pattern and avoids repeating confusing and bureaucratic steps. The choice of Solid was obvious - users control their own data and they don't have to enter their data again for every new job application. The data reside on the pods of applicants and the ones of the employing companies. The web app interacts with these pods' in read/write access under the Access Control of the data owners. The Solid specification foresees the possibility for employers to _subscribe_ and get _notified_ when the dossier of an applicant changes. Under development. ### Discussion * Whether and how to attract _commercial_ partners. TimBL reminds of some UK banks and tax authorities, which are already Solid-compliant. Check https://www.digita.ai/ for some related info. * About Access Control _all the way_. Oz reminds of the Solid notion of _shape_. One needs the full path to the info for accessing it in its entirety. * Another future developement, definitely in the _Roadmap_ is the access to bits of information spread around several different documents. This is not in the Solid specifications. Still it is nice to have and will be done in the future. * To be sure that one develops a Solid-compatible app, even if the Solid specifications don't cover the use-case, one can search other repositories, where unpublished specs exist. ### About _shapes_ Collected offline with input from [@jeff-zucker](https://github.com/jeff-zucker), [@NSeydoux](https://github.com/NSeydoux), [@jaxoncreed](https://github.com/jaxoncreed) and [@timbl](https://github.com/timbl): At the moment, there is no content on shapes on [the Solid website](https://solidproject.org/), because shapes aren't a concept specific to Solid, but rather to _Linked Data_. How shapes are integrated into the Solid specification isn't settled right now. When the role of shapes in the Solid specification is more formally defined, the website will be updated. To discover more about the topic in general, here are a couple of links: * The design issue in which TimBL laid out some thoughts about shapes and Solid: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Footprints.html * The SHACL specification: https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/ * The Shex specification : https://shex.io/ * An example shape: https://github.com/solid/form-playground/blob/master/examples/contacts-shapes.ttl * A place to share common shapes https://shaperepo.com/ Notes by Maria Dimou - CERN-Solid collaboration manager. For notes from previous such events check [the CERN-Solid collaboration index](https://indico.cern.ch/category/11962/) or [the Solid events' index](https://solidproject.org/events).