Do You Also Feel a Lack of Control Over Your Own Tastes? Idea: Universal Cultural Profile with Solid

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Hi Solid community,

Lately I’ve been feeling that, even though I have accounts on countless cultural services Spotify, Letterboxd, Goodreads, and so on I don’t really own or control what defines my tastes. Each platform knows just one slice of who I am, but I never get to see or manage my full cultural self in one place.

So I’m exploring an idea for a “Universal Cultural Profile”, built on Solid. The vision is to have a single Pod where I could collect, view, and manage all my cultural data: favorite songs, movies I’ve watched, books I’ve read, artists I love — all structured by me*, fully portable and interoperable between services.

This way, I wouldn’t need to start from scratch every time I join a new app or platform. And I could use this one profile to get better recommendations, analyze my own cultural habits, or share parts of my tastes with apps or projects I actually choose.

I’d love your thoughts on this:

  • Do you see value in having an open standard (ontology/vocabulary) to describe cultural data within Solid Pods?
  • What do you think are the biggest technical or practical challenges for mapping existing platform data into this structure?
  • What kinds of applications or use cases could you build if you had your own Universal Cultural Profile under your control?

Any feedback, ideas, or collaboration interest would be hugely appreciated!
If anyone is already experimenting with something similar, I’d love to learn more and exchange ideas.

Thanks so much for reading,
Lucas

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Heh, I actually have a couple of half-finished attempts at writing a Solid app like that :slight_smile: So yeah, I think there’s value in it, though I imagine large parts can already be covered by existing vocabularies, and I think this could be done today with a regular Solid app on a normal Solid Pod. The main challenge is someone investing the time to build it, and to keep it up-to-date as Solid changes. Maybe one day I’ll actually finish mine :slight_smile:

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Interesting idea and yes I think Solid is a good match for it. This isn’t exactly what you are talking about but it shows a way of organizing personal cultural data - The Open Culture Browser. It holds tens of thousands of cultural items of interest to me (and possibly others). The linked bookmarks repo holds the Solid code for it and shows how users can create their own bookmark trees and share their cultural collections with others.

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