How do I architect a federated Book Sharing platform?

Build a Solid App Solid App Development FAQs
1

I’m trying to build a federated book sharing platform using Linked Data. Here are my thoughts. I’d appreciate any pointers to resources / tools to help me implement the same.

Here are some questions:

  • What’s the simplest way of publishing the books that I have read / own as Linked Data on my personal website / blog?
  • Recommended ways to ‘crawl’ multiple such website, aggregate the published information on individual websites and build a search interface to enable book lending / sharing?
3

Perhaps, could you be inspired by the ‘national french bibliotheca’ https://data.bnf.fr/semanticweb
I think you could find some vocabulary

5

I’m sorry but I think I wasn’t clear. All that I’m interested in ‘publishing’ on the web is a list of books that I have read / own. This is to enable sharing / lending of books on the open web. I’m wondering what would be the best of going about it.

6

That’s very simple:

  1. Determine where you want to store a collection of RDF sentences e.g., a Solid Pod
  2. Obtain the URI for each book
  3. Write a sentence indicating that you’ve read, like, or own a given book.

Here’s an example using RDF-Turtle and a deployment pattern called Nanotation that turns my example into live Linked Data via the OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer (OSDS) browser extension (available for Web Extensions compliant Browsers e.g., Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave etc… and Firefox).

{

@prefix like: <http://ontologi.es/like#> . 
@prefix schema: <http://schema.org/> . 
@prefix kidehen: <https://solid.openlinksw.com:8444/profile/card#> . 
@prefix weaving-web: <https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/dp/006251587X/#> . 
@prefix : <#> . 

kidehen:me like:likes weaving-web:book ;
                        :read weaving-web:book ;
                        schema:owns weaving-web:book .

}

Here’s a screenshot of what’s revealed in your browser, courtesy of OSDS.

24%20PM
24%20PM825×640 75.7 KB

In addition, OSDS is a Solid-compliant application that provides a “Save As” feature for saving RDF to Solid Pods, subject to WebACLS configured for said pods.

Conclusion

One you save your RDF statements about your book to a Solid Pod the process of building your Federated Book Information Sharing Platform has pretty much begun. Getting more of your friends, family, and acquaintances to do the same simply builds a Web around this information, courtesy of RDF statements constructed using Linked Data principles.

Related

4 Likes
7

This is very helpful! Thank you so much @kidehen!