Read Write Web — Q1 Summary — 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.