Solid Symposium 2023

Solid – Social Linked Data: Future Infrastructure for Data Portability and Data Sovereignty

The motto of the Solid project (https://solidproject.org/) is: "Your data, your choice. Advancing Web standards to empower people". The Solid specifications are based on (semantic) web technologies and follow a decentralised architecture.

The Solid architecture separates data, identity and applications. With Solid, users can store their data securely in Pods – Personal Online Data Stores. Everyone can set up a Pod. Different Pod implementations are available, and several providers offer to host Pods. Pod owners control access to their data via identities managed by different identity providers. Applications access and manipulate the data stored in Pods.

Such a decentralised architecture, where data, identity and applications can be managed by different organisations, works without any centralised component or platform. Thus, Solid provides the infrastructure for personal data portability and personal data sovereignty. Although Solid initially targets personal use, the specifications are quite generally applicable and, in our view, also very well suited for use in an enterprise setting.

The goal of the symposium is to provide a forum for researchers, early adopters in business and government, and the web community to present the current state of the art around solid and exchange ideas for further developments.

Solid provides an infrastructure for data portability and data sovereignty, which are important for Europe's strategic autonomy in the digital domain as defined by the European Parliament.

The conference is organized by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. The Center for Applied Research on Supply Chain Services at Fraunhofer IIS is assisting with coordination and hosting the event.

Sessions

Various panels with presentations by experts are planned for the symposium