Community Solid Server evaluation results

by Maria Dimou (CERN), Theo Martin Meyer

Monday 31 Jan 2022, 15:00 → 16:30 Europe/Zurich

Zoom

Théo Martin Meyer, student of IT University of Copenhagen worked for 3.5 months for his MSc thesis on this project.

The Community Solid Server (CSS) is the new open source Solid server, version 1.0 was announced on August 5th 2021. 

A test CSS server was set-up at CERN and the experience with its configuration and use, subject to Théo's MSc will be described by this talk.

The discussion will focus on the usability of CSS and the use cases for the CERN community.

The CERN-Solid Policy note suggests an in-house CSS instance and the use-case proposed is the creation of long-overdue CERN users' profiles. The EDH, HRT, LANDB, MERIT, dosimetry etc info can be referenced from the users' pods in order to have everything in one place.
Comments by the audience or alternative application proposals will be very useful.

Notes from the discussion

• The UI/UX is the first thing to solve with Solid, as the user's experience is discouraging.
• The IDP can be decoupled from the WebID.
• The Solid OIDC compatibility issue (versus the keycloak OIDC) is due to the fact that the notion of WebIDs is internal to Solid.
• There is a Solid-OIDC / OIDC compatibility issue. For CSS to work with the CERN SSO one needs to work on the keycloak side. Using a proxy that closes a compatibility gap is also a good option. CERN has access to the Digita keycloack proxy code free-of-charge. The company offered us this right. It might become open source - being discussed now.

 

Please contact Maria Dimou for more information on the Solid project.

Ressources regarding CERN's CSS instance

Slides in CodiMd

The policy document for deploying a CERN-hosted Solid server

The same slides in PDF

User manual for CERN users

Video of the talk