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Ruben Verborgh

What’s in a Pod? – A knowledge graph interpretation for the Solid ecosystem

Ruben Dedecker, Wout Slabbinck, Jesse Wright, Patrick Hochstenbach, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh

The Solid vision aims to make data independent of applications through technical specifications, which detail how to publish and consume permissioned data across multiple autonomous locations called “pods". The current document-centric interpretation of Solid, wherein a pod is solely a hierarchy of Linked Data documents, cannot fully realize this envisaged independence. Applications are left to define their own APIs within the Solid Protocol, which leads to fundamental interoperability problems and the need for associated workarounds. The broader longterm vision for Solid is confounded with the concrete HTTP interface to pods today, leading to a narrower solution space to address these core issues. We examine the mismatch between the vision and the prevalent document-centric interpretation, and propose a reconciliatory graph-centric interpretation wherein a pod is fundamentally a knowledge graph. In this article, we contrast the existing and proposed interpretations in terms of how they support the Solid vision. We argue that the knowledge-centric interpretation can improve pod access through different Web APIs that act as views in a database sense. We show that our zoomed-out interpretation provides improved opportunities for storage, publication, and querying of decentralized data in more flexible and sustainable ways. These insights are crucial to reduce the dependency of Solid apps on implicit API semantics and local assumptions about the shape and organization of data and the resulting performance. The suggested broader interpretation can guide Solid through its evolution into a heterogeneous yet interoperable ecosystem that accommodates a multitude of read/write data access patterns.

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Published in 2022 in Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{dedecker_quweda_2022,
  author = {Dedecker, Ruben and Slabbinck, Wout and Wright, Jesse and Hochstenbach, Patrick and Colpaert, Pieter and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {What's in a Pod?~-- A knowledge graph interpretation for the {Solid} ecosystem},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs},
  editor = {Saleem, Muhammad and Ngonga Ngomo, Axel-Cyrille},
  year = 2022,
  month = oct,
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  volume = 3279,
  issn = {1613-0073},
  pages = {81--96},
  url = {https://solidlabresearch.github.io/WhatsInAPod/},
}

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ACM
Ruben Dedecker, Wout Slabbinck, Jesse Wright, Patrick Hochstenbach, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh. 2022. What’s in a Pod? – A knowledge graph interpretation for the Solid ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), 81–96.
APA
Dedecker, R., Slabbinck, W., Wright, J., Hochstenbach, P., Colpaert, P., & Verborgh, R. (2022). What’s in a Pod? – A knowledge graph interpretation for the Solid ecosystem. In M. Saleem & A.-C. Ngonga Ngomo (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs (Vol. 3279, pp. 81–96).
IEEE
R. Dedecker, W. Slabbinck, J. Wright, P. Hochstenbach, P. Colpaert, and R. Verborgh, “What’s in a Pod? – A knowledge graph interpretation for the Solid ecosystem,” in Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs, 2022, vol. 3279, pp. 81–96.
LNCS
Dedecker, R., Slabbinck, W., Wright, J., Hochstenbach, P., Colpaert, P., Verborgh, R.: What’s in a Pod? – A knowledge graph interpretation for the Solid ecosystem. In: Saleem, M. and Ngonga Ngomo, A.-C. (eds.) Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs. pp. 81–96 (2022).
MLA
Dedecker, Ruben, et al. “What’s in a Pod? – A Knowledge Graph Interpretation for the Solid Ecosystem.” Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Storing, Querying and Benchmarking Knowledge Graphs, edited by Muhammad Saleem and Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, vol. 3279, 2022, pp. 81–96.

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