Discussion on the Solid PoC implementation for Indico - CERN-Solid project

Europe/Zurich
Maria Dimou (CERN)
Description

The aim of this  meeting is to discuss:

  1. technicalities of the client-side implementation of Jan's project.

  2. the future of CERN users' pods' hosting.

Participants:  Maria Dimou (notes),  Michiel de Jong (diagramme), Jan Schill (developer).

Summary

  • CERN-Solid PoC implementation client-side in javascript and Indico v.3.
  1. Comments in Indico events. See slide 11 in WhiteArea-CERN-Solid-20210125-presentation.pdf for diagramme.
  2. Personal info on user's Solid pod  for Indico Conference Registration data. See https://indico.cern.ch/event/1011684/images/30735-20210125-CERN-Solid-PoC-client-side-JanSchill.jpeg for diagramme.
  • To participate in the above PoC, we need a pod recommendation for CERN users.
    We recommend to select solidcommunity.net from the pod providers' list.
    Reasons: It uses the NSS solid server, which is the eldest but passes the tests best.
    It runs on SolidOS. The server instance is hosted in the UK, stored in digitalocean.com cloud. Discussion in https://gitter.im/solid/solidos (thread of March 1st 2021) shows that the data are probably in the UK as well.

 

Jan's graph in detail and dev. status/issues

For the "Comments to Indico event" PoC part, the discussion was about Access and  References to these comments.

  1. Viewing comments to public Indico events should be allowed for all.
  2. If one's personal "Comments" folder on one's pod is public, then everyone can see all comments that one has ever contributed anywhere.
  3. Should the implementation foresee one file per comment for the same user?
  4. For Restricted Indico events allow Access and Reference to a comment, only via a link.
  5. https://pdsinterop.org/conventions/

 

Comments from the 2021/01/25 White Area

Preparing the ground for CERN users' pods.

The CERN-Solid PoC by Jan will be implemented using NSS (MIT W3C, started in 2016).
His pod is on an NSS instance hosted in Germany, storage in https://www.digitalocean.com/).
NSS is also used by solidcommunity.net and this the recommended option. NSS is the Solid server that works best but will eventually get out-of-date,

CSS (open source re-write of NSS on Trellis) is not an alternative today. It doesn't exist operationally.

ESS is US-based, closed source, proprietary (inrupt.com), storage in AWS (Amazon Web Services). This won't be a popular option for CERN users' pods (US-based, proprietary).

php-SS (open source) is not ready.

The recommendation is to select solidcommunity.net from the pod providers' list on https://solidproject.org//users/get-a-pod#get-a-pod-from-a-pod-provider

User guide https://github.com/solid/userguide

Some WebIDs:
https://michielbdejong.solidcommunity.net/profile/card#me
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i
https://csarven.ca/#i
https://janschill.net/profile/card#me
https://dimou.solidcommunity.net/profile/card#me

 

About new users' possible confusion

I tried https://www.solidcommunity.net/common/popup.html and found the Olivier example (is it an example?) confusing. What is the difference between "solid community" and "www. solidcommunity.net" on page https://www.solidcommunity.net/common/popup.html
see HERE what I mean.
I went to https://solidcommunity.net/ and pressed "Log in". The popup now looks different.
See the difference.

About a CERN own server

Reading the Solid standard and implementing from scratch a Solid server to host CERN users' pods would be difficult to sell.
How to quantify the effort required?
How to ensure inter-operability with other servers = pod providers?
How to remain conformant, given the test-suite changes?
Why "self hosting" https://solidproject.org//self-hosting/nss only offers NSS?

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