Read Write Web — Q4 Summary — 2016
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 . 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!
