I like the intuition of a ‘set of queries’ because the user can ‘see the results’ and accept them or not.
Maybe it would be worth trying it. :D. Also, why a vector and not just a query? On the other hand, you could have a statistical model (or neural network) trained with your Pod’s data that shows a beautiful song, according to you. Can this be seen as a query?
Probably the meme part comes when you share, copy and merge those models between pods.
I think this topic is relevant to interoperability, but perhaps not necessarily at the ‘applications’ level. Maybe it is more related to exchanging data modeled using the user’s mental model. Using the desktop as an example, I know exactly where specific documents are on my computer. Still, probably it would be difficult for me to find the same in your folder structure—that kind of interoperability.
If I use a Pod, I don’t necessarily want to delegate trust to an assistant. I want the assistant to augment my capabilities, but I still want to decide.
For example, today, without a POD, I maintain a ten year old personal wiki where I write some facts and impressions about the people I interact with. Sometimes I review this history to support an objective decision of trusting or not. Perhaps an assistant can help to gather valuable data to do this kind of thing for me.
I believe the same.
I think ontologies/shapes/schemas/vocabs/hashtags are beneficial when you have to integrate and query things in the open
But when you talk about personal dataspaces, perhaps this becomes more nuanced.
Example: The Solid App specializes in promoting comedy shows. Suddenly ‘Bob’ is scared with the clowns shown to him. He gives feedback, and for Bob, the ‘clown’ ontology drops a ‘is funny’ statement.
However, the app starts getting similar feedback from everyone in Bob’s superstitious town (probably because of an old tale of a killer clown). The town (community) drops as a whole the ‘is funny’ statement.
Note this correction happens in the comedy shows pod, or Bob’s pod, or in Bob’s community Pod, who knows
If I pose that all of this seems highly complex and in very early stages to find broad adoption anytime soon, do you feel that is an accurate statement, or do you have a much more positive take?
Sure, and that is great. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from doing so (am doing so myself at SocialHub). I was just wondering how much need to be done on this interop front, and how the gradual path to adoption might look like. Also those devs already involved with these things might find it less complicated in practice to implement.
Well realistically the most likely outcome in the short term is dominant apps that manage to impose their preferred shape, which others then have to follow, i.e. same thing we have now but in RDF on a user’s pod. It’d be nice if we could aim higher.
Perhaps how much need to be done depends on the use cases defined?
I have the same feeling when I see this through a particular angle:
Pod with apps on top is not so different from a mobile phone with some installed apps. But now solid is using RDF instead of a plain JSON or just a binary.
However, you can immediately argue that thanks to RDF, integrating different data sources becomes exceptionally cheap, meaning that you can combine and consolidate contents from varied personal data spaces with unprecedented granularity.
And with Web identifiers, people can combine their data to, for example, collaborate without third parties involved. People are empowered to form new sociotechnical systems, interaction mechanisms, etc.
The magic does not happen in the Pod-App duality, but in the combination of dataspaces, when people share and interact together. However, one cannot forget that RDF is not cheap; you pay in complexity. And complexity determines how much your system can grow.
There are also other (perhaps simpler) ways to integrate personal spaces using RDF. For example, one can make RDF triplifiers/adapters on top of the major mobile OS. There are already ~5.27 Billion people with mobile phones in the world.
I would love it that there was more research on what happens with semantics in decentralized environments.
Sure, but I am referring to what would be a good practical and operational starting point, that isn’t very likely to be a dead-end compatibility-wise once specifications mature.
