What is Solid?
Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.
In the article written by Tim Berners-Lee about the Solid Framework, he believes Solid will resonate with the global community of developers, hackers, and internet activists who bristle over corporate and government control of the web. “Developers have always had a certain amount of revolutionary spirit,” he observes. Circumventing government spies or corporate overlords may be the initial lure of Solid, but the bigger draw will be something even more appealing to hackers: freedom. In the centralized web, data is kept in silos–controlled by the companies that build them, like Facebook and Google. In the decentralized web, there are no silos.
What does Solid offer?
Solid 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.
It offers –
- True data ownership
- Modular design
- Reusing existing data
We encourage web professionals to review this article to get more information on SOLID.
What is the Solid framework?
The Solid framework takes PDF files and recreates the documents from which they were created. When reconstructing a Word document this includes the identification of text, headers/footers, lists, tables, table of contents, hyperlinks and so on. And it can do this even from printed and scanned documents. Solid Framework can take a printed document and reconstruct it as a Word document including a working table of contents. It can also reconstruct Excel and PowerPoint documents, or extract all of the data from tables within the PDF and create SQL statements, or all of the text or all of the images. And it’s really good at doing so if the original document was a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. Solid Framework’s super-rich API provides access to the content and context of information within a PDF document, allowing you to use that information for whatever purpose your business requires.
Why use Solid documents?
Electronic documents have replaced standard pen and paper. A myriad of document types now exist – from standard paper, to scans, e-mails, electronic documents, Google Docs, billing forms, etc. While document type may run the gamut — from legacy applications to e-documents — not everybody can read, share or save these documents. People work in different environments, on different platforms, and have different versions of applications. And, the mature worldwide standard to share all these documents —regardless of language or platform — is PDF.
Document integrity is critical to the success of document reconstruction and archiving. It is something that helps all users, whether business or consumer — increase productivity, efficiency and realize the true value of their time.
We encourage you to review these links
https://solidframework.net/documentation-2/
Version 6 of Solid Framework SDK
This week we briefly discussed the Solid framework, what it offers, and why it may significantly change our view of the WWW. This seems to be a very interesting approach and we encourage web professionals to remain aware as these efforts evolve. We appreciate our member Brian Anderson bringing this initiative to our attention several weeks ago. We always appreciate insights from our members. Thanks again Brian.
We hope you find these resources and overviews useful. We always look forward to your comments and feedback (whether you are a member or not).
We encourage members (and non-members) check out our social media channels. If you aspire to be a web professional and don’t know where to start, we offer a number of beginning classes to our members via our School Of Web learning management system. As a member, your first class is free.