A presentation of SOLID at Tech-X conference / Gaia-X

Use Solid Connection to Other Initiatives
1

Hi the SOLID community !

With Sylvain Le Bon and Frédéric Lé, as a PHD student working on data spaces and solid and as co-founder / contributor of Virtual Assembly (a french-based non profit organization working on solid-based projects), I’ll be presenting SOLID to the Gaia-X community at the tech-x conference & hackathon in Luxembourg next week (may 23 at 12:00).

You’ll find the introduction below. I’m currently making the slides, so if you have any important points to make, please let me know :slight_smile:

Intro

SOLID defines a set of protocols designed to enable a social, distributed, open and secure
web. It is currently being standardized by the W3C.

According to the Fraunhofer Institute, SOLID can be seen as a relevant technical foundation
for the development of data spaces. A recent paper from the Institute for Human-Centered
Artificial Intelligence (HAI) positions SOLID as an infrastructure that can help overcome the
challenge of personal data interoperability in the AI era. SOLID is based on the web and
semantic web standards stack, it adds a layer of protocols to standardize APIs (LDP), as well
as decentralized management of identities of end users (WebId) and read / write accesses to
data (Web Access Control).

This allows SOLID to dissociate data from applications: Data is stored on the Storages of its
owners, who can then share data in a sovereign way, via interoperable application
ecosystems.

While SOLID does not address the legal, socio-organizational and economic dimensions of
Data Spaces, it does provide a relevant solution for key technical aspects. It could be used in
conjunction with other data space standards and components.

We will illustrate these concepts with two use cases : a large-scale implementation of SOLID
by the Flanders government, and an architecture proposal for using Solid for data
discoverability and integration in the IDS & Gaia-X ecosystems via an indexing engine based
on SOLID and Communica, with data retrieval by LDP in SOLID-based applications.

NB: Very happy to make my first post on this forum!

5 Likes
2

I don’t check the forum as often, so I am late to reply. But I am happy to see that you are spreading the word about Solid!

Solid (even the name) as it is today, beyond the basic mission of data stores and ownership, has as many interpretations as there are people. We see this plainly is W3C WG charter attempts.

At the Solid Symposium, we discovered there are a few really novel application come up, so you might want to check the website there. 2nd Solid Symposium - VITO NV

If you can, please share the slides of what you presented and the feedback you received from Gaia-X folks.

3

Also @GuillaumeAV could you please introduce Gaia-X, their website makes them sound like an advocacy group?

4

Hi Guillaume! Any chance to know more about the use cases? Thank you!!

5

Hi @CxRes & @MMA,

Thank you for your interest,

The slides are not particularly interesting (mainly images), but if you want to discover the world of data spaces and gaia-x in particular, in relation with SOLID, I recommend reading this article: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3543873.3587616

About the feedbacks, they were really good.

SOLID Gaia-X is based almost entirely on W3C standards: Linked data, DID, Verifiable credentials, ODRL.
However, there are issues in terms of data privacy, data discovery and accessibility to data spaces, which could be addressed by SOLID.

We will be exploring possible links in the autumn !

2 Likes