Timothy Berners-Lee The Solid project came out of research at MIT into a powerful web of data
In 2000, MIT CSAIL Decentralised Infomation Group (DIG) got funding from DARPA to work on Semantic Web, which produced RDF-based systems, and N3 rules. The python codebase for that work is now at https://github.com/linkeddata/swap
From 1999 when the browsers developed the ability to do “AJAX”, to call back from the web page client to the server using what was XMLRPCRequest and became fetch(), then it was possible to build systems with the App in the client, with calls back to the server for data storage.
The project in the lab responded to that possibility with the “Tabulator” - a JS client which would allow the user to explore linked data on the web.
2006: Berners-Lee, T., Chen, Y., Chilton, L., Connolly, D., Dhanaraj, R., Hollenbach, J., Lerer, A. and Sheets, D., 2006, November. Tabulator: Exploring and analyzing linked data on the semantic web. In Proceedings of the 3rd international semantic web user interaction workshop (Vol. 2006, p. 159)
2007: Berners-Lee, T., Hollenbach, J., Lu, K., Presbrey, J. and Pru d'hommeaux, E., 2007. Tabulator redux: Writing into the semantic web
2009: Tim BL gave a Ted talk about the importance of the web of data, not just documents, open data on the web. He also talks about the web and Linked Data at the Web Summit that year.
2009: An important aspect of the project was that it attempts to make a class="c11">read-write web of data. Anything the user could read and had permission to write could also be written. The “Read-Write Web” was a mantra. The August 2009 Design Issues notes ”Read-Write Linked Data” and “Socially Aware Cloud Storage” emphasized the need for a read-write web of linked data as a response to the data silos of current social network sites.
2009? an ISWC paper, Hollenbahch, J, et al, MIT, “Using rdf metadata to enable access control on the social semantic web”
2011: There was a Read-Write Web Cmmunity Group, started in 2011, most of its activity in 2012, which discussed the RWW up till around 2017
in 2012, at ISWC, for example, Tim gave a talk about the worlkd od RWLD and the need for standardising the protocol
But once users could write as well as read, access control was important. The W3C’s own site had per-item RDF-based access control with a UI. The tabulator project more or less copied that system, but this time storing access control information in RDF files rather than an access database.
Later work on the Read-writeLinked Data theme was in collaboration between MIT and QCRI, with funding from QCRI. That is when Sandro Hawke thought of the name “Solid” for “Social Linked Data” as a name for the platform - the interface spec between client and server - the protocol.
2016: Mansour, E., Sambra, A.V., Hawke, S., Zereba, M., Capadisli, S., Ghanem, A., Aboulnaga, A. and Berners-Lee, T., 2016, April. A demonstration of the solid platform for social web applications. In Proceedings of the 25th international conference companion on world wide web (pp. 223-226) (here)
2015: As the platform was becoming something which it would be important to standardize and spread, and as for such a broad platform, some customers would need to be able to call on commercial products and services, there was thought of making a company – a bit as Netscape had for the early Web - provide commercial solutions.
In 2015, The team approached Mastercard Labs to see whether they would consider funding such a company. After much technical due diligence, the MC Labs team felt that the platform itself needed more work in the lab. The specs and the open source code needed to be more elaborate. They did then fund the next two years of work in the lab.
In 2017, we looked again at forming a company. Now the time was ripe, with support from local VC Glasswing, and others. The company was Inrupt.
Inrupt created its own enterprise grade Solid Protocol compatible products, and also funded work at IMEC at Ghent University on open source code.
The Solid organization holding the specs was a Github organization, and so much of the interaction used github processes and also Gitter chat. Gitter chat existed around any github org or repo. (Gitter chat later moved to Matrix protcol, now in use in 2023). The Solid community had also a web site and a forum, and series of meetups “Solid World” which went online with Covid.
2018: In October 2018, Melvin Carvalho proposed the W3C Solid Community group. Code contributors were asked to join the CG for the limited IP commitment it would give. A future possible W3C Working group would give much better Royalty Free guarantees, than the CG.
Release dates of the protocol:
2021-12-17 - Version 0.9.0 of the Solid Procol spec released
2022-12-31- Version 0.10.0 of the Solid Protocol[※] spec released
Presentations and press about the Solid movement since 2018 have included:
2018, October, MozFest
2021 dWeb Camp
2022 Web Summit.
2023 dWeb Camp, California
2023 July WeAreDevelopers, Berlin
Early Press included:
2018/7 Katrina Brooker, Vanity Fair, ““I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets”
On 27 July 2022, Tim met physically with the W3C TAG to discuss Solid, during the day and the dinner after.
Tim Berners-Lee, 2023