# Solid Practitioners meeting 2024-03-18

### Present

- Jeff Zucker
- Tim Standen
- Talita
- Rahul Gupta
- Daniel Bakas
- [michal/mrkvon](https://id.mrkvon.org)
- Thhck (Theo)

### Scribe

- Daniel Bakas

### Agenda

- Introduction
- Overview of Previous Meetings

### Previous Meetings

Indexing Meeting

- **Topic:** Indexing and Searching
- Found Common Themes
- Standardized Search Interface
- Indexing Mechanisms
- There’s a recording

Solid World

- Tim presented

New Members

### Transcription

- Jeff:
- I went to the Solid Community meeting. Mentioned our conversation about Indexing and Searching.
- Best time to meet with them?
- We'll try to have them join us
- Rahul:
- I'd love to see us to discuss notifications
- Jeff:
- Schedule CG index/search meeting
- Schedule meeting on digital signatures
- Schedule meeting on localization
- Schedule meeting on Tools/Libraries
- Schedule meeting on Notifications
- Jeff: Feel free to ask questions or propose topic
- Rahul:
- There's a lot of work going on around credentials
- Interesting work on signatures and message verification
- Work on Australia could be relevant to Solid
- Jeff: Any specific Solid work?
- Rahul: Not specifically. Solid is http, so it's easily transferable
- Jeff:
- This group will be looking for what we can do in the short term,working with Solid.
- Rahul
- Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/119/agenda)(https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/119/agenda)
- Privacy Session: https://solidweb.me/besteves4/sosy24-privacy/privacy-session.html

- Daniel: Has there be any talks around app developer, UX, libraries, Solid integration & UI/UX component libraries?
- Jeff: There's a new group on datamodules, Michiel de Jong is in charge, so you can get in touch with... (the Friday UX/DX group?)
- Daniel: Thanks
- Jeff: I'm introducing Solid Web components. Should be able to present a prototype for a component in a couple of weeks. They are written in plain vanilla HTML JavaScrpt components.
- Jeff: Angelo Veltens is also working on web components for Solid ([PodOS](https://github.com/pod-os/PodOS))

- Daniel: Is the onboarding group still on? [...] How is that effort going?
- Jeff: There's the repo, but no one is in charge of it. There's an open position to keep that effort going.
- Daniel: I'll wait for everybody to share questions for Practitioners, then I'll share
- Jeff: As practitioners, we may need to take some of that onboarding on ourselves
- Rahul: Who is in charge of delegating [?] to the Solid Team?
- Jeff: I'll get in touch with them.

- Daniel: Question for the group: I remeber last time i came, we tried to define a high-level map to get closer to our goals. Is that conversation still ongoing - what are our goals and interests etc.?
- Jeff: Special topics are issues that people face in their projects. Is that what you meant?
- Daniel: [...] Search [... says other examples :)]
- Jeff: We want to have a project oriented focus. If you have a project, we can schedule a meeting about a given project.
- Jeff: There's a hackathon coming up. I encourage everyone to join and participate. It may have already started or it will start in a couple of days.
- Jeff: If you'd like to have a Hackathon you could share your idea or proposal and we will share it with Inrupt.
- Daniel: I'm personally interested in that. In Latin America there's a growing interest around decentralization & Solid, and hackathon would be interesting for community, [...], based on what you just said, we may need a draft or proposal to share with community or Inrupt. Maybe we could also share it with our university, that could act as a bridge between community and students.
- Jeff: Let's pursue that.
- Homelessness Portland Project, ... Directing energy to the project could be an effect of hackathon (?)
- Rahul: Daniel, where are you from?
- Daniel: From Mexico - Mexico City .I've been working with Semantic Web for 6+ years, last time I shared the project which is about data visualization ... Over those 6 years, I was able to share Solid with different communities, organizations, governments, ... and they expressed keen interests in interoperability and data, in particular government could see a nice use case for decentralization for citizens and community. It's worth pursuing eventually, we have our eyes on it.
- Rahul: Where are they taking the interests specifically? Where can the contribution from the community come from?
- Daniel: I've had conversation with Foreign Relaion Secretariat and National Statistics institute. There's overlap between governance and analytics of the population. ... The interoperability between dependencies of the government is reduced. Having the single source where all citizens could store their government-related data and all government agencies could access that data, but to give also citizens controls over their data. By giving citizens their data and let them use different applications, they can produce different analytics... So far we've had high-level talks.
- Jeff: I hope you've seen the last Solid World video. There have been 2 presentations about Government. Flanders have ... Tim and Wilf work in Portland ... Wilf works with national institute of standards. Those are all in line with what you're thinking in relation with Mexican government.
- Daniel: They have need for localized or regional interoperable schema or ontology that dependencies can share as single source of truth for data modeling and knowledge engineering. They were curious about this. If there's no standard and everybody can ... Infrastructure interoperability would be good but data interoperability would be nightmare. How are project handling this?
- Jeff: Solid covers what a Solid Server should be. Right now with the type indexes and various efforts, we're developing shapes. A list of predicates that can be expected in a well defined profile. Also, how would you store and access multiple things. It starts with individual projects, and that is then consolidated in a client to client specification. I am currently working on this. This is in the process on becoming a work item and a client to client spec.
- Daniel: Excellent. Is that part of the topics of interest that you mentioned at the beginning?
- Jeff: I'm always up for it. If others want to talk about shapes, I'm up. And notifications.
- Daniel: What y'all think? Would this be interesting? Data modelling and ontologies work
- Tim: There's multiple government and army efforts to make a standardized ontology for all government data.
- Jeff: Tim, do you have an ontology?
- Tim: We adapted an ontology from urban development. Some people have worked ...
- Jeff: Can you share a reference to that ontology?
- Tim: Yes, of course. https://hmis-interop.github.io/
- Tim (chat): This is also the common core ontology developed by other US agencies:
https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2021/10/14/nist-ai-rfi-cubrc_inc_004.pdf
- Jeff: We could then extract that to a standard ontology or client to client spec.
- Rahul: To pick on both Daniel and Tim's comments,
- Daniel: In Mexico, foreign secretary is focused on 2 aspects: migration & structural approach - root causes that cause the immigration crisis in the north with US, also weapons and drugs - relevant but heavy stuff - it's important, it's critical - but sometimes it's not attractive to dev communities, they want something practical. And Violence in Mexico. There is violence injustice surrounding drug trafficking. Those topics at least in Mexico, but also in other Latin American countries are most pressing to government
- Rahul: With all these issues, how are you intending to leverage Solid? What tech solutions
- Daniel: That's omething that I'm working on, I work on learning more. Giving ballpark answer: We have millions people coming to the country, and we have very poor mechanisms that would allow people access to their documents. To store and manage the data, this could be interesting for the organizations that support these people more than for people as end users.
- Jeff: That's related to what Tim & PASS work in Portland with homeless population. They want to have documents accessible for social workers. Organizations will be able to access the relevant documents when the person comes and gives them access.
- Tim: We're also interested in a more secure mean of communication. We're also interested in the migration topic Daniel was mentioning.
- Rahul: NGO will need the same technology that Tim is using off the shelter. Would be great to have event where it can be showcased for other use cases
- Daniel: I'm interested in that. Talk to foreign reltion secretariat, statistical institute and other government agencies: There's this very interesting community that allows people to store their data where they want. We can have hackathon also with you Tim and your community, come together, event where we can answer these questions. Ask the question and see if the community and developers can provide the answer
- Tim: Definitely interesting! I don't have resources to organize this in Portland, but if somebody wants to do this ...
- Daniel: I'm at the similar place, but it would be great to meet about this, and I see overlap between our projects.
- Jeff: Would you be interested in translating PASS project to your needs, like take one government agency whose needs it would meet, and transform it
- Tim: We can support this
- Daniel: I'll talk with my contact in Foreign Secretary. I'll get back to you on that and see if it leads us to something interesting
- Jeff: How to start getting governments interested in this stuff, that's relevant topic for us
- Rahul: How is the organizational ontology coming along?
- Rahul: We don't document in a central place how the different projects that are already implementing solid overlap.
- Jeff: I'm absolutely interested in that. We have a Solidifying Solid Solid Project. This would standardize and generate a website containing all projects and their overlap.
- We can get ourselves a nice RDF graph of who we are and what we do.
- Daniel: We'll need the information and data about the projects to feed the visualization. Do we already have an unstructured document somewhere, even plaintext?
- Jeff: We have minutes and we may need to pull data out of the minutes. ... We can present to public after. Instead of having catalog, we can provide e.g. WebID of Semantyk and it will lead to the Semantyk-controlled data which can be used. I'm working on shapes for this, and i'll present it here, and you can share what needs to be in that shape. If you have thoughts on that, go to organization repo and share your thought
- Daniel: Me and Semantyk would love to help, let us know.
- Jeff: Definitely.
- Jeff: Rahul and I will be speaking in the Solid Symposium in Belgium in ?April?... We will be talking about the work we are doing here at Solid Practitioners.
- Rahul: Have a look at ?. And Jeff, please see if you can contact him. https://uvdsl.solid.aifb.kit.edu/conf/2024/sosy/tutorial
- Daniel: I find it really useful to define problems that Solid or any project solves. What i have troubles with - When i talk about Solid, people say what problem does it solve? Why Solid? That's why Solid Onboarding was very interesting to me. I understand Solid on high level and I understand it in terms of solutions, but i've had troubles explaining the problem. Personally i understand it, but a single source where i could read it, does something like this exist?
- Jeff: That's not onboarding. That's for people who want to figure out technical workings. What you talk about is how governments can be interested, and that's within scope of this group. Interoperability is part of this. Interoperability is a major problem for governments. Solid offers strong solution to that. Data autonomy is not necessarily their goal, but we can connect it to that as well.
- Daniel: I see. My question is also where we can add value, where can we solve problems, offer solution, and say: This is why we're doing what we're doing. Not just individually, but defining it together.
- Jeff: I will find you a link, I think will be useful: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/diagrams/solid/SN-dystopia.svg
- Daniel: I love how all the social media are coloured red as harmful and [...].
- Jeff: https://webfoundation.org/2024/03/marking-the-webs-35th-birthday-an-open-letter/
- Jeff: https://timbl.solidcommunity.net/2023/03%20EWADA/TAGExplainerforSolid.html
- Jeff: are you suggesting that we as a group should create a document - explainer of solid?
- Daniel: Especially the perspective of Practitioners group. What matters to us as Practitioners.
- Jeff: I suggest you to start a draft and open a PR to the repo.
- Daniel: Great.

- Jeff: If there are no more questions or issues, see you next time.