Read Write Web — Q2 Summary — 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!