Read Write Web Community Group

Read Write Web Community Group
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Read Write Web Community Group
Read Write Web Community Group
This group was closed on 2023-12-12.
The activity of this group is to apply Web standards to trusted read and write operations.
w3c-cg/rww
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Read Write Web — Q4 Summary — 2017
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
January 7, 2018
Summary
TPAC 2017
kicked off in California, achieving its highest attendance to date, with some saying it may have been the
best TPAC ever
.  Extensive
Strategic Highlights
were also published.
HTML 5.2 is now a recommendation, with HTML 5.3
coming
.  Work on payments made progress with some
demos
presented at money 20/20.  There was also a nice look ahead to
2018 and semantic web trends
from Dataversity.
A slight pickup in activity this quarter in the community group.  With around 75
messages
, almost double the previous quarter.  More details below.
Communications and Outreach
Aside from Fedora, there was some
outreach
this quarter with CERN, where it all began, with a view to possibly reuse Web Access Control.
Community Group
In the CG there were calls for
team members
with Sebastian Samagura starting a project.  An
announcement
of the Fedora API Spec CR and a fantastic post by Ruben entitled, “
Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web
“.
Applications
By convention it’s been decided to try to add the ‘solid-app’ tag to new and existing apps for the solid platform, which will hopefully allow apps to become
searchable
.  One new app,
twee-fi
, was written from scratch quite quickly and seems to work with all our servers.  There is a general move to patch existing apps to follow this pattern so that both OIDC and TLS auth can be leveraged.
There have been updates to
rdflib.js
solid-ui
and
solid-app-set
.  I also made a small console based
playground
, solid-libraries, that shows how these libraries fit together, and allows a few commands as examples.  Additionally I have started trying to patch apps to use the new auth system starting with the
pastebin tutorial
.  Hopefully more apps will be patched this quarter.
Last but not Least…
The
OWL Time ontology
is now a W3C REC. The ontology provides a vocabulary for expressing facts about topological (ordering) relations among instants and intervals, together with information about durations, and about temporal position including date-time information.
Read Write Web — Q3 Summary — 2017
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
October 3, 2017
Summary
A relatively quiet quarter in the community group, however, some good progress has been made behind the scenes.
There was a new
release
, this quarter, to
schema.org
.  The
Shapes Constraint Language
(SHACL) is now a W3C Recommendation and
ActivityPub
is also a candidate recommendation.
There was light discussion on the mailing list, however, there was also a major release of
node solid server
(4.0.0) which includes a new authentication method,
WebID-OIDC
Communications and Outreach
There was some outreach the folks at the
Rebooting the Web of Trust
workshop, and I’ll also be talking to the team from
Remote Storage
, about reusing JSON-LD as part of their model for reading and writing to the web with HTTP verbs.
Community Group
A quiet quarter in the Community Group tho Sebastian Samaruga has been investigating the idea of Semantic Business intelligence and has started a
blog
and
codebase
on the subject.  There was also testing of the new version of node solid server with some success.
Applications
As mentioned above node solid server 4.0.0 now has WebID-OIDC support, N3 patches and many other
features
A new version of
solid auth client
was released in which will allow login via both TLS and OIDC.
It is possible to try out the latest version on the
solid test server
.  Which will lead the user to a default set of apps, and a data browser which both read and write data, and has quite a few built in apps which are fired off depending on the (rdf) type of data being viewed.
Last but not Least…
Virtuoso 8.0 was also
released
, with
ABAC (Attribute-based Access Controls) and the WebID+TLS+Delegation Protocol, existing open standards (such as TLS, HTTPS, URIs, and RDF) are leveraged to aid the development and deployment of new and more-agile services and solutions
Read Write Web — Q2 Summary — 2017
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
July 1, 2017
Summary
This quarter kicked off with a full program at
www 2017
in Perth and continued with
ESWC
which included an award winning paper on
Linked Data Notifications
Solid
gain some traction this quarter going from 500 to 1500 stars on github, after a few articles publicized the protocol.  Linked data continues to evolve in search with with google now
including
fact check data powered by schema.org.
A new proposal was also introduced called
Linked Data Templates
, which aims “to provide means to define read-write Linked Data APIs declaratively using SPARQL and specify a uniform interaction protocol for them”.
Communications and Outreach
Following the announcement of Linked Data Templates, there was an invitation to join the
declarative apps community group
, which some of us have.  Please feel free to join this group and get involved with the evolution of read-write standards.
Community Group
This quarter saw the
announcement
and call for participation of Linked Data Templates, which interestingly is a protocol, neutral to transport method (HTTP, IPFS etc), however, the specification shall provide bindings for the HTTP protocol.
There was also an excellent blog post from Kingsley
show casing
a number of the technologies we’ve been looking at over the years, and demonstrating the
openlink smart data bot
Applications
Relatively quiet quarter for apps with much work being done on authentication.  There was also the release of
twinql
, “A graph query language for the semantic web”.  Work on updating libraries,
rdflib
, and servers, node solid sever have been bumped to the latest versions.  There was work done on the
solid connections ui
, an application to manage the solid social graph.
And also the release of the
Openlink Smart Data Bot
, “Smart Agent that provides a single RESTful interface for interacting with a variety of Actions (operations) provided by APIs”.
Last but not Least…
Congrats to timbl on
winning the Turing award
, often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Computing, “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale”.  An invention that continues to change all our lives, and hopefully one we can all help to bring to its full potential!
Read Write Web — Q1 Summary — 2017
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
April 2, 2017
Summary
A quiet start to 2017 as people prepare for
www 2017
and
ESWC
.  An active political quarter saw the inauguration of a US new president, and numerous concerns raised about new laws regarding the
privacy at the ISP level
The Linked Open Data cloud continues to grow and has a neat update
here
.  There has also been a release of the
SHACL playground
which allows data to be validated according to various “
shapes
“.
Linked Data Notifications
has become a Proposed Recommendation, and will allow users of the web to have a data inbox, and enable a whole host of use cases.
Communications and Outreach
Collaboration has started to begun with two cloud providers,
nextcloud
and
cozy cloud
.  Hopefully this will bring read and write web standards to a wider audience, over time.
Community Group
Some
ideas
for extending the way PATCH works has been described by TimBL.  I found interesting the way data can be transmitted over other protocols than the web
– When clients of listening to the same resource are in fact located physically close, they could exchange patches through other medium like wifi or bluetooth.
– The system can evolve (under stress) to work entirely with distributed patches, making the original HTTP server unnecessary
– The patches could be combined with hashes of versions of folders to be the basis for a git-like version control system, or connect to git itself
Applications
There is a new test
website
for the openid authentication branch of node solid server and
solid client
has been updated to work with this.  There have been various fixes to rdf and solid libraries, and two new repositories for
solid notifications
and
solid permissions
Good work has continued on
rabel
, a program for reading and writing linked data in various formats.  In addition the browser
shimmed
apps on
solid-ui
solid-app-set
continue to improve.  Finally, *shameless plug*, I am writing a gitbook on a skinned version of node solid server,
bitmark storage
, which hopes to integrate solid with crypto currencies, creating self funding storage.
Last but not Least…
On the topic of crypto currencies, I’m very excited about a draft paper released on
semantic block chains
.  There was some buzz generated around this topic and hopefully will feature in a
workshop
next quarter.
Read Write Web — Q4 Summary — 2016
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
January 1, 2017
Summary
An eventful 2016 draws to a close, steady progress has been made on standards, implementations and apps, for reading and writing to the web.  Some press coverage is starting to emerge, with pieces on
a decentralized web
and
putting data back in the hands of owners
.  Also published was a nice review and predictions for
trends in 2017
on the (semantic) web.
Linked Data Notifications
has become a Candidate Recommendation, and expected to become a full recommendation next year, as the working group has been extended slightly.
Data Best Practices on the Web
is also now a Proposed Recommendation.
In the community group a few apps were released and there was a renewed interest in
WebID delegation
, with a browser extension produced that allows one to delegate authentication to a trusted agent.  I also put together a spec, library and implementation for dealing with
GroupURIs
Communications and Outreach
Some collaboration took place on the WebID front.  There was also an innovative spec put together for working with
X.509 fingerprints
.  There was also some
inquiry
of using WebID for cultural purposes with Drupal.  And also an interest from
divvy dao,
qbix
and others to implement
Solid
Some neat slides were created by dmitri on
understanding linked data
and an
introduction to solid
Community Group
A browser extension has been
published
that allows
WebID delegation
to function native in the browser.  One advantage of this is to make authentication systems a point of flexibility allowing login via password, oauth or other services to a delegated agent which can then be trusted via PKI.
I wrote a little spec regarding
GroupURIs
, which given a set of participants in a group, allows one to deterministically create a new URI for that group, that can be generated independently.  This leads to the possibility of things like group chat rooms being created dynamically, I have an
implementation
and
prototype
of the spec also working, which allows you to create conference calls with people you know over webRTC.
Applications
A fair amount of work has been done refactoring and making production ready the main solid reference implementations.  For example, the
permissions
module is now standalone, and both
gold
and
node-solid-server
now support WebID with delegation, with gold also offering a
proxy
server.
Work has continued on adding openid connect to solid and there is a live test server that is prototyping the
new login flow
.  A new linked data server in
perl
has been written by
kjetilk
.  The linked data document editor,
dokie.li
, continues to improve, and as promised here, is a
screencast
showing off the new features.
Last but not Least…
Linked Data Fragments
has now come up with some impressive demos using the
Triple Pattern Fragment
technique.  In addition to the endpoint on
dbpedia
, kudos to Ruben Verborgh who has
published
25,000+ triples on his own site.  And finally, an excellent integration with
wikidata
viaf
and dbpedia, all working in one browser, was created.  Try it
here
Read Write Web — Q3 Summary — 2016
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
October 2, 2016
Summary
The community group celebrates its 5th birthday this quarter.  With almost
3000 posts
(roughly 2 per day) from around 100 members a large number of topics have been raised, discussed and resolved.  A bit thank you to to everyone that has been involved!
On the subject of statistics, there was a great paper produced by AKSW:
LODStats: The Data Web Census Dataset
which provides a comprehensive picture of the current state of a significant part of the Data Web.  There was also a
status update
from the LDP Next Community Group and Data on the Web Best Practices is now a
Candidate Recommendation
TPAC 2016
got under way in Lisbon.  While there was not a dedicated RWW session this year, many members of the group attended various related topics.  There was some interest reported around the work on
Verified Claims
, which hopes to form a working group quite soon.
Communications and Outreach
Apart from TPAC, I was able to attend the
3rd annual Hackers Congress
at Paralelni Polis, which aims to spread ideas of decentralization in technology.  I was able to interact with some thought leaders in the crypto currency space and try to explain the decentralized nature of the web and how it can grow organically using standards to read and write.  I also got a chance to talk to people form the
remote storage
project.
Community Group
Having reached the 5 year milestone, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on the direction of the community group.  Do we want to keep going as we are, focus on specific topics, me more discussion oriented or more standards creation oriented?  I’ll send out a questionnaire on this.
thread
on ways to (re) decentralize the web generated some discussion.  There was also some discussion around the
Internet of Things
and a possible new
framework
for using Linked Data to read and write.
Applications
More work has been done in modularizing the solid linked data browser / editor into separate modular chunks (
solid-ui
solid-app-set
), that can be used to create apps on data, using a javascript
shim
.  An analogy I like to think of is RSS being a structured data format but with some code it can become a useful application.  Solid app set allows this to happen for any class of data.  I am really enjoying this paradigm and have started to translate the apps I write.  Here is an example of a
playlist
pane translation of a
clients side app
.  Tim has written a lot more of these in the same repo.
Node solid server has progressed, with the permissions system being broken down into its own module,
solid permissions
.  Also improvements have been made to the
profile ui
and the
dashboard
, which are still works in progress.
Much progress has been made on the document editor,
dokie.li
, which is now also driving the
Linked Data Notifications
spec towards Candidate Recommendation, and integrating with the
Web annotations specs
.  An slightly older
screencast
of functionality is available here, but I am told new ones will also be published very soon.
Last but not Least…
We welcome the launch of
Cognoto
Cognonto (a portmanteau of ‘cognition’ and ‘ontology’) exploits large-scale knowledge bases and semantic technologies for machine learning, data interoperability and mapping, and fact and entity extraction and tagging.
Check a sample
term
, or read more from this comprehensive
blog post
Read Write Web — Q2 Summary — 2016
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
July 1, 2016
Summary
Decentralization is becoming more and more of a theme on the web, and this quarter witnessed the
Decentralized Web Summit
, in San Francisco.  Keynotes from
Tim Berners-Lee
and
Vint Cerf
are definitely worth checking out.
Some interesting work is coming up in as a verified claims working group has been
proposed
.  The
editors draft
is available for review.
In the Community Group, there has been a some discussion, but main focus is on apps, and also a specification for linked data notifications has been started.
Communications and Outreach
Aside from the Decentralized Web Summit, some folks attended the
ID2020 summit
which aims to help provide legal identifiers to everyone by 2030.  There was much interest there on the idea of decentralized identifiers.
There was also a session at WWW 2016 entitled
Building Decentralized Applications on the Social Web
Community Group
A new spec has been created called “
Linked Data Notifications
“.  The system combines the concept of an inbox with the idea sending notifications to users.  Please feel free to take a look at this work, provide feedback or raise
issues
.  Some light discussion on the
mailing list
and a few apps and demos have been released.  More below!
Applications
Lots of application work going on in the
solid
and
linkeddata
github repositories.  Solid.js has been renamed to
solid client
, and provides lots of useful features for dealing with solid servers.
The Solid connections
UI is an app to help manage your social graph.  Work has begun on an improved
solid profile manager
. A new
signup widget
is also being worked on.
The tabulator project has been modularized and split up into various components and
apps
(aka panes) so that anyone can build and
skin
a “data browser” capable of working together with web 3.0.  Lots more interesting work in the individual repos.
I have done some work on the economic side release version 0.1 of
webcredits
, which provides a linked data based ledger for apps.  A demo of the functionality built on top can be seen at :
testcoin.org
.  Im also happy to report that I have got solid node server running on my phone and it performs really well!
Last but not Least…
Nicola Greco has collected a cool set of papers described as a “
reading list
” : of articles or papers relevant to the work of Solid.  It is possible to drop your own paper in by adding a new issue.  Happy reading!
Read Write Web — Q1 Summary — 2016
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
April 1, 2016
Summary
The start of this year has seen a much the discussions on read write technology, move from the mailing list, to specific repos, issue trackers, and, particularly,
gitter
chatrooms.  Most of the work that I have noticed has been focused around the
Solid
standard.
An interesting new Linked Data project called,
GIESER
, kicked off in March, described as, “an open cloud-based platform for integrating geospatial data with sensor data from cyberphysical systems based on semantic and Big Data technologies.”  Openlink also
announced
the release of their JavaScript based RDF Editor.
Discussion
in the group ticked up slightly, but most of work has been focused on implementations of servers, libraries and apps.
Communications and Outreach
The Qatar Research and Computing institute (
QCRI
) was paid a visit and continue to support the development of read and write standards on the web, particularly
crosscloud
and solid and their own app platform, meccano.
There was a successful hack day at MIT, and new interest in read write apps, with also a short tutorial used to show attendees how to write a
pastebin app
.  For those interested in hacking on read write apps, please
join
us on gitter every Friday for a coding session, where we try to come up with new and interesting ideas.
Community Group
We welcome Dmitri Zagidulin to the group, who has started working full time with the team at MIT on Solid (and doing an amazing job!).  On the mailing list, there was some
discussion
based around “
Solid Cookies
“, and about
connecting two LDP servers together
Applications
The
Solid specification
continues to improve, in order to cater for a growing set of applications.  It has now been organized into a number of smaller self-contained specifications.  Some work has been done on authentication, and
discovery
methods have been documented for inbox, storage and application type registries.
On the server side we have seen a lot of work go into maturing the javascript solid server,
ldnode
.  And on the client library side
solid.js
has also added new features and documentation.   In addition, a tutorial has been added for
rdflib.js
Some new apps have been
added
, or started, mostly still in early stages.  Two of the apps I created during hack days are,
2048
, the popular puzzle game, and a simple
markdown editor
that saves files to Solid storage.  Briefly,
Zagel
is the start of a chat app, work has begun on a
Solid welcome app
and a
Solid Signup
system has been created.  More apps have been created in the form of,
contactorator
a contacts app, simple
slideshow
integrated into tabulator,
errol
which is notifications for Solid inboxes,
midichlorian
a tool for fetching files from Solid servers.
Last but not Least…
Interesting food for thought.
Kuzzle
describes itself as an :
open-source back-end solution
for various applications. It combines a high level API, a database, a real-time engine, subscription and notification mechanisms as well as some advanced search features. The API is accessible through several standard protocols.
Read Write Web — Q4 Summary — 2015
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
January 1, 2016
Summary
A quiet end to the year in terms of discussions, but lots of work going on in implementations.  Perhaps this is a sign that read write standards for the web are entering a maturation process and 2016 will be a year of using them to see what they can do.
Many of the participants of this group attended
TPAC 2015
, in Sapporo Japan, and it was by all accounts it was a very exciting experience, with the W3C moving towards working groups in Payments, among other things.  A good
wrapup
of W3C data activity included: data on the web best practices, spatial data and CSV.
Most of the activity I noticed this quarter was oriented towards the maturing Solid
specification
, which has been reorganized into logical sections (thanks Amy!) and I’ve presented is a small
gitbook
Communications and Outreach
Presentations on read write standards were given at the redecentralize
conference
.  One video is available
here
and all the talks on the Solid platform are now in a github
archive
Community Group
A quiet quarter on the mailing list, as I think more people are devoting time to implementations, perhaps 2016 could be a good chance for feedback as to which items the group would like to focus on.  There was also one interesting
post
on open badges.
Applications
Work on applications has picked up considerably this quarter, with much of the focus on client side javascript apps for the
Solid
platform.  A great new library for building Solid apps is available now and called,
solid.js
.  Additionally I have tried to put together some basic
tutorials
for getting started with apps.
Two great apps built using this library are called solid-inbox and plume.
Solid-inbox
is a tool to let you see the items in your “inbox” which is an area that users have designed for notifications.
Plume
, a pet blogging project, allows you to create rudimentary blogs on using Solid standards.
A new tool for writing Solid documents,
dokie.li
, is progressing well.  Originally designed to author academic papers, it is becoming more generic to allow any kind of document to be authored using linked data.
and
identity providers
have been improved and it is now possible to add your own identity provider to create a more diverse system of decentralized web identity.  This can be done by running one of the
Solid servers
on your own machine, or by creating your own fork!
More great work from openlink in the form the
structured data sniffer
which turns much of the existing web into structured data.
I’ve been personally working on an proof of concept, alpha version of a social network that implements Solid called,
solid.social
.  Some rough
notes
also accompany the site, that provide some screenshots and hopefully an idea of the direction things can go.  Other than that, some basic command line utilities for reading and writing, were also written in the form of
rdf-shell
Last but not Least…
A new startup supporting decentralized read write technology
co-operating systems
was launched.  From the site:
“We envision a web where we can use applications tailor-made for each of us. These applications will navigate linked data seamlessly across organisational boundaries. They will allow us to choose where to host our information, with whom we share it, and how we identify ourselves. This will create a distributed social web which will foster innovative ideas, help transform them into projects and allow us to share resources securely.”
Looking forward to further updates on this work!
Read Write Web — Q3 Summary — 2015
Melvin Carvalho
Posted on:
September 30, 2015
Summary
A relatively quiet quarter in world of (read-write) web standards.  Generally my impression is that the emphasis is shifting more towards implementation, with most of the hard parts of design out, now of the way.  Andrei gave a great presentation at the re-decentralize web
conference
in Brazil.
There was quite a bit of discussion regarding decentralized identity, same origin policy and public / private key provisioning in the browser.  In particular, the KEYGEN element was looked at, with some wanting to deprecate it.  However, it was
established
that it’s still in use and would not be deprecated just yet, hopefully something better will soon be available.
More work this month on the SoLiD platform, apps (see below), some discussion on PKI, trust and reputation systems, on the web.  MIT /
Crosscloud
are also going to continue their great work and announced they are hiring two developers.  Please take a
look
if interested.
Communications and Outreach
There was some more discussions with the
Social Web Working Group
.  There was great news as it was announced that Sarven Capadisli and Amy Guy would be
joining
MIT with some more good work in this area.
Community Group
The
SoLiD
framework now has it’s own logo and area on github.  There was a short discussion regarding creating a
decentralized
a web of trust.  Based on this I put together some tools to convert public keys between formats and
use
them to encrypt, decrypt and sign messages.  We also started a wiki page for
getting started
with the SoLiD framework.
Applications
Some steady work this month on applications.  To illustrate different aspects of development with the SoLiD platform I put together a short series of apps, each created in under 24 hours.  The first was a
hello world
app, then a
clipboard
, a
video display
app, a simple
chess game
and a
data explorer
Lots of work was completed on
ldnode,
gold
and
rdflib
.  And also the start of an excellent realtime collaboration
pad
by timbl, which has turned out to be very useful already!
Last but not Least…
More great work from openlink as they prepare to release to production an excellent generic linked data document
reader and editor
.  Feel free to give it a try, preferably using your own data space!
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