Pod View Apps. I envisage multiple apps here, but it takes just one to get this rolling.
We will I expect, have some standard locations for our data, such as folders named documents, music, pictures etc, but over time these will fill with lots of data, so we’ll also need to search this, and I think with the power of Linked Data this can be a lot better than what we are used to from search, and could well become the preferred way of interacting with our data.
For example: interacting through ‘views’ of all the data we have, that can leverage the semantics and other clues such as folder location (music v pictures v documents etc), access control (public v private v group v individual-x), links (related to x) and of course the resource name and content.
Essentially views that can be standard, or customised, or which are really just a nice UI for a search engine tailored for personal data stores, but which could of course reach out from pod to pod.
These can be fine grained or coarse as required, and the beauty is that there will be different routes to finding the data we want instead of just a fixed folder structure, or search by name. A route for each individual’s way of doing or imagining things, and a route for each task, each mood, instead of struggling to find the precise folder among thousands where that data ended up months or years ago.
I think this is a big topic, but we can start with one app and spawn a family of different Pod View apps. We can switch from one to another, and apps can build on features from other apps.
This is one of the beauties of the openness of the Solid ecosystem for me, where data and apps are no longer tied together, the potential for creating better apps, that make better use of the data, is multiplied many times.
Thanks to @JornWildt for the conversation which crystallised this suggestion. I imagine others have already expressed this idea, so I take no credit. Oh, well, if you insist 