Live shared Pod Data – making it happen

Use Solid Connection to Other Initiatives
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Thanks to Sarven Capadisli’s prompt on solid/chat, I have scraped more of the Solid community for motivation and prior work on this area. I’m sure the references below are not yet comprehensive, but it’s a start.

Opinion

Support for live collaborative editing of Pod data in the corpus of documented use-cases and requirements is found only in allusion, and not called out as motivating for the Solid specification. However, engineers have made calls for patch-passing data distribution mechanisms, for strong reasons which do include enablement of user features. This is a disconnect.

There is an accelerating trend towards remote collaboration in software, including live collaborative editing becoming table stakes for many kinds of user content; as well as version control with branching and merging, for others. I think engineers are aware of this, but it’s hard to capture feature requirements for new applications that users don’t have in front of them yet. This is especially a problem when other motivations for patch-passing are to do with performance and resilience, things that are only perceived by the user when they’re broken.

Data

solid/user-stories

As a developer, I want to be able to subscribe to a stream of pod events #22 – Open

  • “Event-driven architectures are very powerful in that they allow to create loosely coupled reactive systems.”
  • This is marginal as a user story, but refers to other feature requests:
    • As a user I want to be able to have an audit log of what happened to my data #12
    • As a user I want to be able to restore previous data #10

solid/specification

Standardizing state changes in resources (history, undo, sync) #161 – Open

  • Ruben V: “but then we should probably have collaborative editing as an issue/use case”

Act on the latest version of the resource state #91 – Open

  • “This discussion is re-discovering wiki edit conflicts, and source code change management, and ACID-style databasing, among other things.”

What server-based notification support is required? #49 – Open

solid/data-interoperability-panel

Problems and Goals for Interoperability, Collaboration, and Security in a Solid Pod

  • “data will be manipulated not only by different applications, but also by different people or automated agents.”
  • Does not mention live or realtime manipulations

w3

Collaboration cases in pwp-ucr, but live collaboration is not specified:

  • UC 72: “Andreas is working on his first collaborative research paper with a fellow student.”
  • UC 20: “Tanya and Kelly are collaborating on curriculum for the upcoming school year.”

Annotation cases for ‘live’ data in dpub-annotation-uc:

Open Data collaboration in dwbp-ucr:

Socialwg/Social API/User stories - W3C Wiki

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