Notes from the February 2022 Solid World webinar

by Maria Dimou (CERN)

Thursday 10 Feb 2022, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Zurich

Notes from the 2022/02/10 Solid World Webinar.

Presentation material will appear on https://solidproject.org/events.

Agenda of this event:

Monthly updates — Tim Berners-Lee, Ruben Verborgh, Oz Olivo

Tim Berners-Lee, welcoming volunteers to write tests
SolidOS pod solidos.solidcommunity.net contains a blog and news on the development.

Oz: Inrupt contributions to the specs'compliance test-suite.

Ruben: storing chats and email in one's pod. Check https://github.com/SolidLabResearch/Challenges/issues

Guest presentations

Gertjan de Mulder, Researcher, Ghent University

Gertjan  presented  PROV4ITDaTa, an open source tool to transfer personal data from any app (for now flickr, Imgur & Google contacts) to one's own pod. PROV4ITDaTa is a data processing platform to integrate your personal data from existing web services and systems to your Solid Pod. Inviting the public to propose more apps. Maria Dimou suggested LinkedIn profile and contacts. Gertjan considered this a good case.
https://prov4itdata.ilabt.imec.be/docs#adding-data-providers

Pete Edwards, Software Engineer, Inrupt

Pete  presented  the V1.1 release of the Conformance Test Harness (https://github.com/solid/conformance-test-harness), which makes reports easier to read for server developers testing their software against the Solid Spec.

Discussion after the formal part of the meeting

The test results were presented from a local file on Pete's computer. Maria Dimou asked for a persistent URI that one can share and discuss. Pete replied: At present we have agreed not to publish results for other implementors. Whilst there is still a lot of change in the spec and tests the worry was that we can generate distrust in either when the priority is really to evaluate whether the test/spec are correct. When the ecosystem is more mature I can imagine us wanting to encourage people to publish results to a central location. For now we just want to encourage developers to run the tests and help us improve them, or improve their implementations.

The discrepancies can be due to:
 - errors in the specs
 - errors in the implementations
 - errors in the tests

These are server-side tests only for now. Encouraging users to run the tests by themselves. Sander van Damme now does a PhD on formally define "Governance models on Decentralised Web technologies".

Edward Carter, USA-based  mentioned how culture changes on public's awareness on one's own data and who can access them. New ideas Solid brings to the table: Zero trust environment, zero host env.

Links from this event

General Info about Solid World

• View the recording of this event and all previous Solid Worlds on Vimeo

• Sign up for the This Month in Solid newsletter

• Or contribute your own updates to the newsletter

• Propose a talk for an upcoming Solid World on this form

• Continue the conversation on the forum or the Gitter chat

• Keep an eye out for upcoming Solid World events by following us on Eventbrite

• Follow us on Twitter

• Reach out to us at info@solidproject.org

Tim’s Update

• SolidOS Pod Homepage

• Read Jeff Zucker’s new blog on Modeling the Social Benefits for Organizations

Ruben’s Update

• Check out the SolidLab challenges

Gertjan’s Presentation

• PDS Interop

• Conventions

• PROV4ITDaTa web app demo

• Source code

• Follow Gertjan on Twitter

• Reach him at gertjan.demulder@ugent.be

Pete’s Presentation

• Specification tests

• Coverage report

• CTH repository

• CTH docker image

• Gitter channel for test suite

 

 

Please contact Maria Dimou for further information on the CERN-Solid collaboration.