Solid

Overview

Solid is a proposed set of conventions for building decentralized social applications on the Linked Data stack. This document contains design notes on the individual components used, intended to be a guide for developers who plan to build servers or applications.

Solid is modular and extensible. It relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards.

Solid applications are somewhat like multiuser applications where instances talk to each other through a shared filesystem, and the Web is that filesystem.

Features:

  1. Servers are application-agnostic, so that new applications can be developed without needing to modify servers. For example, even though LDP 1.0 contains nothing specific to "social", many of the SocialWG User Stories can be implemented using only application logic, with no need to change code on the server. The design ideal is to keep a small standard data management core and extend it as necessary to support increasingly powerful classes of applications.
  2. The basic protocol is REST, as refined by LDP with minor extensions. New items are created in a container (which could be called a collection or directory) by sending them to the container URL with an HTTP POST or issuing an HTTP PUT within its URL space. Items are updated with HTTP PUT or HTTP PATCH. Items are removed with HTTP DELETE. Items are found using HTTP GET and following links. A GET on the container returns an enumeration of the items in the container.
  3. The data model is RDF. This means the data can be transmitted in various syntaxes like Turtle, JSON-LD (JSON with a "context"), or RDFa (HTML attributes). RDF is REST-friendly, using URLs everywhere, and it provides decentralized extensibility, so that a set of applications can cooperate in sharing a new kind of data without needing approval from any central authority.

The LDP specification defines a set of rules for HTTP operations on Web resources, some based on RDF, to provide an architecture for reading and writing Linked Data on the Web. The most important feature of LDP is that it provides us with a standard way of RESTfully writing resources (documents) on the Web, without having to rely on less flexible conventions (APIs) based around sending form-encoded data using POST.

To find out how LDP works, you can take a look at the examples in the LDP Primer document.