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I love the ideas in the article! Elegant way to resolve Solid’s ongoing issues.

It’s the direction i’ve been hoping for, but have been too shy to ask.
(((:arrow_up: link to unfinished article, maybe don’t go beyond intro :sweat_smile:)))

When i read these ideas clearly explained by one of the Solid’s leading thinkers-influencers @RubenVerborgh , it gives me a boost of optimism for Solid. I hope we pick this direction asap. :slight_smile: :crossed_fingers:


rant follows

As Solid app developer, I’ve failed to deal — in my thoughts — with the issues described in the article (rigid discovery, permissions). It caused me anxiety about investing energy into Solid. I thought it was doomed to fail due to its limits. Furthermore, thoughts about including Shape Trees in the specification (thus enforcing rigid document structure) gave me further reasons to despair. (Sorry interoperability panel…)

This approach solves a major part of my issues!

As app developer, i don’t care for documents at all. I need to CRUD data. I want to provide an expected shape to the data storage, and receive subgraph that matches the shape and user’s permissions. Some form of query engine seems necessary (LDF, SPARQL)
Recently i’ve enjoyed ideas behind shape repo and LDO by @jaxoncreed. Graphs and shapes - yay!

I agree with @NoelDeMartin - to focus on making things work.
Yet i hope that we make this work: Graph-centered pods with triple-and-blob-level permissions, and with query endpoint(s). (Great to read that it’s not in conflict with document approach. Thanks article!)
I also wish Solid community would take more practical, demo-first approach to writing specs. (developers of solid unite! :muscle:t4: :muscle:t3: :muscle:t5: :muscle:t2: :muscle:t6: :smile:)
Until then, i’m also going for type indexes, and painful dealing with documents and granular permissions.

I find (knowledge-)graphs, and basic RDF, and data shapes super intuitive. I think everybody can. (think colorful dots and arrows). The difficulties start when we try to express them in linear text documents. Not sure why documents should be more intuitive for devs. We work with databases, structures and queries all the time.
(ok, let’s not start about how expressive & universal, or not, RDF is. maybe it’s good enough, idk, let’s find out in practice…)

I’ll end the rant here… :sweat_smile:

rant fades


Thanks for reading! :blush:

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