What app would you love to see on Solid?

The first thing you need to do with Solid is prove the superiority of the concept in a capitalistic fashion. In other words, it needs to be demonstrated that Solid is built for commercial purposes. Most people aren’t going to be too excited by reading about “linked data” blah blah blah. Besides that, Solid should not be aiming to impress “most people”. Solid’s key demographic is INDIVIDUALS WHO RUN LARGE FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS.

To me, the exciting part about solid is a unique ID, constantly encrypted, with a personal encryption key that can be used on transactions across the internet. The big deal here is not having everybody’s credit card #s stored in one place for hackers to concentrate on attacking. Data migration and emails are all very nice but that is not what is going to compel actual companies to put money into developing for Solid.

If you just develop an app for Pizza Hut or Dominoes or someone and prove that you can increase the security of actual financial transactions, the battle is won. Tim Berners Lee has discussed how the internet was not designed for privacy; it was designed for sharing and that led to huge security weaknesses when the web became a commercialized tool. Well, DEMONSTRATE HOW THIS SYSTEM SOLVES FOR THAT!!

Solid could spend years as just another ecosystem fighting for its niche. However, if you demonstrate that it is in fact far less vulnerable to hacking–and even invulnerable to a large-scale hack, you will have companies pouring billions into its development.

So give us a pizza ordering app or partner with a bank and adapt their software to work with Solid. Get even a midsize bank to allow you to migrate their user-interface over to Solid and then invite people to attack it.

If you can do that and it works, nobody will have to come on this forum and ask for any apps in Solid because EVERYONE will already be migrating.

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Made it into a wiki so anyone can edit

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Naive question maybe, but why can’t the financial institutions just do it themselves?

They can. However, that question presupposes that they want to. Solid is a new technology. It’s unproven. It is perfectly reasonable for a company to be reticent to spend their money implementing a technology that may or may not be supported ten years from now.

There are any number of technologies constantly competing for preeminence on the web. Solid needs to show why it is the technology that deserves to win. If someone can demonstrate that Solid is significantly better vis a vis web security versus the status quo, there won’t be an ecommerce company anywhere that doesn’t use it. Once that happens, support for the platform is guaranteed and all of the other apps that make the world a better place will come to be.

Trying to emulate things that already work fine with current technology and show how Solid allows for a slightly better user experience is frankly a waste of time. Number one, a company like Facebook isn’t going to want to implement a technology that leads to information portability and therefore allows users to pick up and leave; so an existing social networking app being an early adapter is out. Number two, email works fine already and people don’t really care what platform it is running on so long as it works. The same goes for data migration. Data can be migrated just fine right now. So those are out. Number three, data portability is a great thing, but making the average person realize that is something else. People get comfortable using a product and they tend to stick with it–hence the first-mover advantage.

When you are in a fight (in this case a fight for web supremacy) you go for your opponent’s weakness. The current web has very weak data protection. Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Amazon–you name them, they’ve been hacked. Billions are being spent to try to protect data. Solid is designed around encryption and decentralization. Show everybody from banks to your local auto parts store that they can solve this problem by moving to Solid and all you have to do is get out of the way. But don’t expect them to do it for themselves. Having a great product is only half the battle. You have to make people realize how great it is.

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I think another weakness of the current web is the lack of collaboration between apps/systems due to the data silos. If we can show what can be done through app collaboration or just through data sharing, Solid will have also a chance.

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An idea from @tuelsch and @pheyvaer on https://gitter.im/solid/app-development – A hub for ontologies, where ontologies could be registered and that could notify subscribers of new ontologies or of ontology changes.

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An idea for a guided browser, due to @JornWildt here, where a browser or browser component could be guided by a guide or data shape kept on a pod, and remind the user with visual cues when the browser strays from the guide, and/or restricts the user to browsing according to the guide.

@tuelsch How difficult would it be to implement that in the web app you already have?

@pheyvaer, @anon36056958 I don’t think it would be very difficult, allthough the feature to submit your own ontology is missing at the moment (besides pull-requests, but thats for devs only). Users with a pod could get their notifications delivered to their pod or, alternatively, plain old emails.

Another feature I’m looking into, is visualizing the relationships between properties, classes and ontologies (like http://visjs.org/network_examples.html but nicer), to enable visual exploration of whatever “thing” you’re currently viewing.

Also, I might have to step up the indexing game server-side, because the current implementation is not really scalable to, say, 10’000 ontologies (like swoogle claims to have indexed).

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Sounds great, but don’t let the best be the enemy of the good :slight_smile:

For this, for sure have a look at WebVOWL. The authors have done a lot of research regarding the visualisation of ontologies. Really nice stuff.

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@tuelsch I noticed that whattheontology uses rdflib.js. A little while ago I looked into adding a d3 serializer to rdflib.js so that graphs can be visualized with it. Unfortunately I have been distracted and have not completed that work. D3 is also used by Webvowl . They use a D3 force simulation, which I think would be not too hard to add to rdflib.js. The changes I think can be pretty much localized to two files: serialize.js and serializer.js. This will I think be ok for smaller ontologies, but I think for larger ones 3d will be necessary to make sense of them and then also some kind of paging will be necessary. I would suggest not going too far with the visualization in the first iteration. For one thing its a very big subject, and for another thing the rdf library space also has comunica which probably eventually will have some fancy visualization features.

Sorry @tuelsch I had not seen vis.js before. It looks very interesting and the samples from the showcase, especially the wikipedia mapper, are awesome.

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Quiz app

An app along the lines of Quizlet but better, where quizzes, their answers, study sets and flash cards could be composed and others could take quizzes, with their answers, scores, achievements and qualifications being stored on their pods.

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Spam detector for your inbox. The same as for your email inbox, but for the inbox of your POD. Fully customizable with rules.

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A (product) review and rating app.

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Based on visjs , you Can try http://spoggy.herokuapp.com/?source=https://smag0.solid.community/public/spoggy/Spoggy_features.json
You Can import json or ttl ( some bug with multilines) and you Can create json or ttl and export to your POD ! See Menu/SOLID
Take a look at help for more détails

A hub for ontologies sounds interesting to me. Especially as small specialised ontologies become available with the possibilities to integrate them as part of a larger ontology. A modular contribution and the ability to compose might reduce the effort to use ontologies in Apps or Applications in general.

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How about a Solid Operating System?

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I think that’s where Hydra will eventually go. Just a guess.

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