Discovering Available PODs and Data Types

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Hi, I’m relatively new to Solid, so bear with me if this question has been answered.

Is there a solution or a method for Discovering PODS and the Data types each contains?

Here’s a scenario/use case that illustrates what I’m looking for.

I reviewed a department store credit cards updated Privacy Policies recently. In the terms and conditions, any reviews and feedback posted to the stores website or social media campaigns, the store assume all rights and IP

Embracing the concept of Data Ownership, my first thought is to create the feedback, persist it to my POD, and find a way to share the feedback that retains IP/creative control.

The next logical thought is, 'wouldn’t it be great to find all PODS in the Solid Ecosystem with similar data(reviews), query the Pod Data sources, and compile a list of similar reviews?

To complete this query, the application needs a way to find all available Pods with product/vendor reviews. So a facility to identify Pods and its Data content is whats needed.

Any thoughts on how this is, or can be done within the Solid platform, are appreciated.

2

There’s no spec-defined method to do this. To some extent, I would compare this to the early days of the web: people just published websites, and there was no way to find all of them.

So then people started building directories (e.g. Yahoo!, DMOZ) and search engines (e.g. Google) on top of the web to solve that problem. One could imagine similar approaches to arise for Solid, but at this point, I’m not aware of any work in that area.

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Thanks Vincent…

I’m considering an approach to this challenge that’s similar to Mesh Network Neighbor Discovery. Each POD has an address book of known PODS, and shares that with other PODs in the Solid Ecosystem as requests are made.

NextCloud, who presented at the April Solid World, uses a similar approach. The option to share the NextCloud instance address book as part the response to a Data Sharing request is available.

Since the information contained in each POD may be sensitive(and entirely legal), the idea here is also to allow the POD owner to share only with trusted associated POD owners. And avoid ‘announcing’ the data availability to others outside the owners circle of trust.

So, if anyone has any thoughts, or ideas on how this would fit with any long range strategy for the Solid Ecosystem, please weigh in.