5 ms·

Reading the landing page left my scratching my head too. Great lofty goals and all, but zero informat on _how._ The fact that you had to go to links from the

Reading the landing page left my scratching my head too. Great lofty goals and all, but zero informat on _how._ The fact that you had to go to links from the example kind of makes it a failure.

Animats 9y ago
Exactly. "Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols." That sounds like a pitch from some ICO. The site has the buzzwords. It's got the neckbeards. What it doesn't have is a convincing use case. It comes across as some really complicated scheme for address book synchronization. They have three sample applications, yet all you can click on is somebody's blog entry. Clicking on the "publishing" app gets you a screenshot of the abstract of someone's paper. It's a single page web site, like all the cool kids have now. Clicking on the top menu items just scrolls the page. It has MIT and Bernars-Lee behind it, so it can't be totally bogus. If those names weren't on this, I'd assume it was from someone either clueless or crooked. There's a decent description of Solid on Github.[1] From there, you can see the real problem. It's only useful if the big players adopt it. Which they won't, because it breaks their walled gardens. This looks like is another try at Bernars-Lee's "semantic web" - hammer as much content as possible into standard formats so it can be machine processed. This is an old idea, and tends to break down once you get beyond contact lists and library catalogs. There have been major efforts to make that work in the business sector, where it's called "electronic data interchange", and parties want to exchange purchase orders, invoices, and bills of lading.[2] It's worth looking at that area to see how hard this is for even simple-seeming problems like that. And they have cooperation - buyer, seller, and shipper all want that data to flow smoothly between the parties. Trying to do this in today's world of competing closed web empires is much tougher. The medical data records people have it even worse, I hear. [1] https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-intro https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-intro [2] https://www.edibasics.com/what-is-edi/ https://www.edibasics.com/what-is-edi/
- JabavuAdams 9y ago
  If machines can read, why does data need to be machine-readable? Seems like a transient.
  - rambojazz 9y ago
    Because even if you can read you need context, or you need to be able to identify what a new word means. Reusing a shared vocabulary is useful.
    - JabavuAdams 9y ago
      I don't understand. If you already agree on a shared vocabulary, then you're not using new words. Context is more present in the long-form un-pre-processed text than in the short-form text.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    For the same reason an organization will ask you to fill in a standard form page (even on paper) rather than writing a long form essay.
    - JabavuAdams 9y ago
      Why do they do that, again? I'm not arguing against summaries. Just saying that if machines can read as well or better than humans, then machine-readable in the sense of using a simplified ontology, grammar, or alphabet is unnecessary.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        My point is that even humans make fewer mistakes when they're reading an established form structure with pre-defined fields over long-form text. Hence you'd expect a machine to process them better as well, even if it could read like a human.
- lolive 9y ago

Reading the landing page left my scratching my head too. Great lofty goals and all, but zero informat on _how._ The fact that you had to go to links from the example kind of makes it a failure.

Animats 9y ago

Exactly. "Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols." That sounds like a pitch from some ICO. The site has the buzzwords. It's got the neckbeards. What it doesn't have is a convincing use case. It comes across as some really complicated scheme for address book synchronization. They have three sample applications, yet all you can click on is somebody's blog entry. Clicking on the "publishing" app gets you a screenshot of the abstract of someone's paper. It's a single page web site, like all the cool kids have now. Clicking on the top menu items just scrolls the page. It has MIT and Bernars-Lee behind it, so it can't be totally bogus. If those names weren't on this, I'd assume it was from someone either clueless or crooked. There's a decent description of Solid on Github.[1] From there, you can see the real problem. It's only useful if the big players adopt it. Which they won't, because it breaks their walled gardens. This looks like is another try at Bernars-Lee's "semantic web" - hammer as much content as possible into standard formats so it can be machine processed. This is an old idea, and tends to break down once you get beyond contact lists and library catalogs. There have been major efforts to make that work in the business sector, where it's called "electronic data interchange", and parties want to exchange purchase orders, invoices, and bills of lading.[2] It's worth looking at that area to see how hard this is for even simple-seeming problems like that. And they have cooperation - buyer, seller, and shipper all want that data to flow smoothly between the parties. Trying to do this in today's world of competing closed web empires is much tougher. The medical data records people have it even worse, I hear. [1] https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-intro https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-intro [2] https://www.edibasics.com/what-is-edi/ https://www.edibasics.com/what-is-edi/

JabavuAdams 9y ago
If machines can read, why does data need to be machine-readable? Seems like a transient.
- rambojazz 9y ago
  Because even if you can read you need context, or you need to be able to identify what a new word means. Reusing a shared vocabulary is useful.
  - JabavuAdams 9y ago
    I don't understand. If you already agree on a shared vocabulary, then you're not using new words. Context is more present in the long-form un-pre-processed text than in the short-form text.
- icebraining 9y ago
  For the same reason an organization will ask you to fill in a standard form page (even on paper) rather than writing a long form essay.
  - JabavuAdams 9y ago
    Why do they do that, again? I'm not arguing against summaries. Just saying that if machines can read as well or better than humans, then machine-readable in the sense of using a simplified ontology, grammar, or alphabet is unnecessary.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      My point is that even humans make fewer mistakes when they're reading an established form structure with pre-defined fields over long-form text. Hence you'd expect a machine to process them better as well, even if it could read like a human.
lolive 9y ago