Read Write Web — Q1 Summary — 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.
