DevCon talk Supercharging the SAFE Network with Project Solid

DevCon talk “Supercharging the SAFE Network with Project Solid” by @happybeing

Watch the video with introduction by @joshuef (thanks Josh) here (this link is for the whole DevCon but will start at my talk):

Ask any questions on this topic and I’ll do my best to answer ASAP.

Here’s a link to the slides I showed, but also quite a few more which give more about Project Solid as well going through what was presented in the video:

FYI the Links from the final presentation slide:

SAFE RESTful interfaces (WebDav, Solid/LDP, FTP, SMTP etc.)

I’ve made some proposals I would love feedback on. These are for ways to add support for any RESTful web protocol (so not just Solid / LDP), and include some thoughts about how to evolve the SAFE NFS API to support this better:


Related Forum Topics

  • Community forum:

Timely article advocating personal data ownership using Project Solid on a decentralised cloud:

  • Developer forum:

Developers

To developers I say, please don’t wait for me or anyone else on this. It took me a while to get here, and as just one slow old guy I can’t carry this by myself. So if you are interested I hope you will dig in, learn, play and I’ll be around to help anyone who interested in this stuff.

I’m going to be doing other non SAFE stuff that I put aside to get to this point, so won’t have as much time as I have been for a few months at least. So a good use of my time might be helping others do stuff with this, although I do expect to keep coding when I get the time.

So any questions, any idea you want to discuss, please get in touch.

Future Activity

Some of the things that could be being worked on (let me know if you are working on any so we and others can co-ordinate):

44 Likes

great talk Mark thank you very much !!

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Have you contacted Tim Berners-Lee? Is he aware of this?

When I asked about it https://forum.autonomi.community/t/tim-berners-lees-solid-on-safenetwork/ here I wasn’t aware that you were hands on making it happen.

This is amazing @happybeing !

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Yes, I met Tim last November and had a long geek chat. Since then he and his team have been helping me get to grips with Solid, mainly on their chat.

More here:

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The questioner in the room asked about the difference between Linked Data and other formats such as JSON.

LDP and Solid support many formats, but the default is Turtle, a particular representation for Linked Data. A Solid client can request other representations, XML, text and so on, but it is optional whether or not a Solid server supports them. There’s a special flavour of JSON for Linked Data called JSONLD (IIRC).

The point of LinkedData though is that it was designed according the the web standard, for the web, and by its inventor, so it conforms with the web in ways that other formats may not, and is also designed with that ability to crawl and run queries (e.g. with SPARQL).

So LinkedData is the ideal fit for web clients of the sort Project Solid and Project SAFE have in mind if you can adopt, but it can easily inter-operate with other formats.

12 Likes

So, how does linked data mix with privacy and apps … do you have to authorize apps to access or is anything submitted open to all? Not quite sure if I get the bigger picture here, but sounds really cool.

2 Likes

In Solid you control access to your data on a per resource basis - so think per file and/or per container - but we don’t yet have that in SAFE NFS so that’s on my wish list (see this dev post).

10 Likes

@happybeing Mark, this was the perfect talk chap and fulfilled my own personal expectations with SOLID and SAFE. I think this will go much much further, but your talk was right on the button and should be listened to by any dev creating apps on SAFE. If we can encourage the integration of SOLID and its templates then we can have that semantic web, securely and also take that much further.

Thanks again Mark, I (and everyone else) owe you a huge beer.

30 Likes

right click video:‘Copy video URL at current time’

Edit: ah yes I know what you mean, must be a bug in the Discourse…thought it would have been fixed by now

Edit 2: this works - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DKjsJxVdfg&feature=youtu.be&t=6h02m48s

Maybe this can be put into the FAQ…the trick is to use the Youtube ‘Share’ function and input the time in HoursMinutesSeconds

1 Like

This is where it starts :slightly_smiling_face:

5 Likes

Thanks @chrisfostertv and @Josh - I’ve fixed up the link.

It actually starts at 6:02:48 - not sure how I got that wrong - so please will you delete or correct any incorrect links so we don’t confuse people!

Thanks again :slight_smile:

David, thanks very much. I hope it was understandable to as many people as possible.

I think you were onto this years ago, so thanks for pointing the way. It took me a long time to realise its potential, which I only did when I started to see if I could get a Solid app working on SAFE. So this is a recent revelation for me, and is still ongoing. Thanks man.

I’d like more people to catch this bug, and hope my talk and the demo can help spread the ideas behind Solid among the SAFE Network community.

To this community I say, please don’t wait for me or anyone else on this. It took me a while to get here, and as just one slow old guy I can’t carry this by myself. So if you are interested I hope you will dig in, learn, play and I’ll be around to help anyone who interested in this stuff.

I’m going to be doing other non SAFE stuff that I put aside to get to this point, so won’t have as much time as I have been for a few months at least. So a good use of my time might be helping others do stuff with this, although I do expect to keep coding when I get the time.

So any questions, any idea you want to discuss, please get in touch :slight_smile:

19 Likes

That was me. Sorry if I was too daft to see the difference on my own. Thanks for the clear answer though, very informative. By the way, your Safepress/Plume blogging app is wonderful/superb/brilliant.

6 Likes

Developers

To developers I say, please don’t wait for me or anyone else on this. It took me a while to get here, and as just one slow old guy I can’t carry this by myself. So if you are interested I hope you will dig in, learn, play and I’ll be around to help anyone who interested in this stuff.

I’m going to be doing other non SAFE stuff that I put aside to get to this point, so won’t have as much time as I have been for a few months at least. So a good use of my time might be helping others do stuff with this, although I do expect to keep coding when I get the time.

So any questions, any idea you want to discuss, please get in touch.

Future Activity

Some of the things that could be being worked on (let me know if you are working on any so we and others can co-ordinate):

11 Likes

:blush:

https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/989245559277019136?s=20

Tim also retweeted this :slight_smile:

https://twitter.com/safepress/status/989198557633794048?s=20

37 Likes

wooo :clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap:

8 Likes

Woohoo that’s massive! :tada::heart_eyes:

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That is great to see! I was hoping positive vibes would reach Tim!

I thought it was a great presentation and I didn’t realise you had taken it so far already! I’m both pleased and impressed! :slight_smile:

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Mark, its no more than you deserve chap. All this work will pay off bigly :smiley: seriously though, this is one area of the front end that really matters a lot. Semantic plus security and privacy is massive. If we can throw in some homomorphic encryption (sorry for the horrible word) then we can have true medical research of mass data and do so privately. That would be immense actually. Lots to do but this along with truly scalable and shared neural nets and we have a hyperspeed jump for AI research where it matters. Spotting causalities and comparing genomic and proteomic data will save lives in my opinion.

Then it really begins, the real Internet :+1: one that works for us and us alone, not for corporates or governments, but for us the people, 100% of the people. Hats off to you chap.

49 Likes

Very happy to be proven wrong in regard Sir Tim never supporting Safe. Congrats to Mark for persevering with this.

17 Likes