# W3C [Solid Community Group](https://www.w3.org/community/solid/) and [WebAgents Community Group](https://www.w3.org/community/webagents/) Joint Meeting

* Date: [2023-09-26T14:00:00Z](https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/82f5ae9e-ff66-4a8a-8bd8-42212d627b46/20230926T140000/)
* Call: https://meet.jit.si/solid-cg-webagents-cg
* Status: Draft

## Present
* [Sarven Capadisli](https://csarven.ca/#i)
* [Andrei Ciortea](https://id.inrupt.com/andreiciortea)
* [elf Pavlik](https://elf-pavlik.hackers4peace.net)
* [Antoine Zimmermann](https://w3id.org/people/az)
* [Sabrina Kirrane](http://sabrinakirrane.com)
* [Fabien Gandon](http://fabien.info)
* [April Daly](https://github.com/ADaly-LabWare)
* [Samuele Burattini](https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/samuele.burattini/en)
* [Danai Vachtsevanou](https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/entities/person/Danai_Vachtsevanou/publications)
* [Jérémy Lemée](https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/entities/person/Jeremy_Lemee/publications)
* [Wouter Termont](https://github.com/woutermont)
* [Ted Thibodeau](https://github.com/TallTed/) (he/him) ([OpenLink Software](https://www.openlinksw.com/))
* [Alessandro Ricci](https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/a.ricci/en)
* [Nicolas Robert](https://github.com/NicoRobertIn)
* [Philippe Duchesne](https://github.com/pduchesne)
* [Julian Padget](https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/persons/julian-padget)
* Tim Berners-Lee
* Jan Van den Bussche
* [Rem Collier](https://people.ucd.ie/rem.collier)
* [Hasan Eroglu](https://github.com/hasanheroglu)
* [Alexandru Sorici](https://crescdi.pub.ro/#/profile/67573)
* Alon
* Ellen Rapaport

---

## Announcements

### Meeting Guidelines
* [W3C Solid Community Group Calendar](https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/solid/calendar)
* [W3C WebAgents Community Group Calendar](https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/webagents/calendar)
* [W3C Solid Community Group Meeting Guidelines](https://github.com/solid/specification/blob/main/meetings/README.md)
* No audio or video recording, or automated transcripts without consent. Meetings are transcribed and made public. If consent is withheld by anyone, recording/retention must not occur.
* Join queue to talk.
* Topics can be proposed at the bottom of the agenda to be discussed as time allows. Make it known if a topic is urgent or cannot be postponed.

### Participation and Code of Conduct
* Join
* [W3C Solid Community Group](https://www.w3.org/community/solid/join)
* [W3C WebAgents Community Group](https://www.w3.org/community/webagents/join)
* [W3C Account Request](http://www.w3.org/accounts/request)
* [W3C Community Contributor License Agreement](https://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/cla/)
* [Positive Work Environment at W3C: Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct](https://www.w3.org/Consortium/cepc/)
* Operating principles for effective participation is to allow access across disabilities, across country borders, and across time. Feedback on tooling and meeting timing is welcome.
* If this is your first time, welcome! please introduce yourself.

### Scribes
* Danai Vachtsevanou
* elf Pavlik
* Sarven Capadisli

### Introductions

* Andrei: Assistant Professor at St Gallen University working in multi-agent systems, socio-technical networks, hypermedia, etc.
* Fabien: Senior Researcher at Inria, leader of the [Wimmics Lab](https://team.inria.fr/wimmics/) interested in linked data and AI techniques on/for/by the Web
* Danai: PhD student from the Univ. of St.Gallen, working on Interaction specs for Web-based Autonomous Systems
* elf Pavlik: independent, co-editor of Solid-OIDC and Solid Application Interoperability (SAI), as well as co-author of Solid Notifications. Developing open source TypeScript implementation of SAI (client & server) and Solid Notifications (client)
* Alessandro:
* Antoine: Professor at École des mines de Saint-Étienne, doing research about the Semantic Web since 2004; since ~10 years ago, started getting interested in applying SemWeb tech to MAS; co-chair of the WebAgents CG
* Philippe: Software engineer with a background in open linked data and data on the web standards. Now technical lead at Datavillage. Experimenting with Solid for the past 3y, implementing a confidential data mining platform on personal data.
* Sabrina: Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Interested in both Solid and Agents. Primarily working on policy and norm representation and reasoning, for instance licensing, privacy-preferences, and regulation.
* Jérémy: student from the Univ. of St.Gallen, main topic is on cognitive abilities for Multi-Agent Systems on the Web. I am interested in how agents could help bring together the distributed knowledge present in many Solid pods.
* Samuele: PhD student from University of Bologna, main research topic is on Digital Twins and how to create a Web of Digital Twins that agents can use to work in the real world
* April:
* Ted: Since December 2000, Technical Evangelist for [OpenLink Software](https://www.openlinksw.com/), makers of [Virtuoso Universal Server](https://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/) which powers DBpedia, UniProt, and most other public SPARQL endpoints and/or RDF triple-/quad-stores of the [Linked Open Data Cloud](https://lod-cloud.net/). Primary coding language is English, and has fingers in many W3C WGs & CGs focusing on Linked Data, RDF, Identity, Privacy, VC, DID, and the like.
* Nicolas: junior engineer in [Wimmics Lab](https://team.inria.fr/wimmics/) and interested in semantic Web and NLP
* Julian: reader in AI in the computer science department at the University of Bath. Research is broadly situated in multiagent systems with a particular interest in policy representation and reasoning and the engineering of values into socio-technical systems. I also participate in standards making at ISO and IEEE. I have dabbled with SOLID, IPFS, and blockchain in the context of IoT/WoT.
* Wouter:
* Tim: interested in the link between Bots and Agents (?)
* Jan: Hasselt University, Belgium, active in research in database systems and theory, interested in web agents that manage access to Solid pods.
* Rem: University College Dublin, Ireland doing work in Multi-Agent Systems for many years, interested in web agents; also co-chair of WebAgents working group.
* Hasan: Technical University of Munich, Germany, Master's student/Working Student at Siemens. Worked with WoT before. Interested in both Solid and WebAgents.
* Alexandru: Assistant Professor at the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, member of the WebAgents CG, interested in Ambient Intelligence, Context Management and Activity Recognition research topics. The main interest in SOLID is with respect to web access control and its use to enable context-aware access and discovery of web resources for agents on the Web.
* Sarven: Chair the CG. Work on Solid since 2015. Edit/author a couple of [Solid TRs](https://solidproject.org/TR/), e.g. [Solid Protocol](https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol). Work on [dokieli](https://dokie.li/) to exemplify specs.

---

## Topics

### Introduction to the WebAgents CG

URL: https://www.w3.org/community/webagents/

Proposed by: [Andrei Ciortea](https://id.inrupt.com/andreiciortea).
Presented by: [Andrei Ciortea](https://id.inrupt.com/andreiciortea).

* The **motivation** for the WebAgents CG comes from the origins of the WWW, and how machine intelligence could use the Web to manipulate reality. This necessitates the incorporation of semantics into the Web, a process that has been advancing through the release of W3C Web of Things Recommendations as well as work on Linked Data, and Solid Linked Data.
* **Open issues** and questions:
* How to design hypermedia-based environments that support autonomous behaviour?
* How to design software agents able to learn, plan, and adapt in order to achieve their tasks through flexible autonomous use of hypermedia?
* How to design, represent, and reason about interactions among autonomous agents, people, and other resources on the Web?
* How to design and govern communities of autonomous agents and people on the Web?

* **Joint discussion** with multiple communities to address these open questions:
* Links between WebAgents CG and Solid CG:
* Use cases enabled by the Solid ecosystem
* Tooling and infrastructure related to Solid to may support the design of long-lived and open Web-based MAS
* Links between WebAgents CG and Web of Things CG/WG
* Use cases in which to apply Web-Based Multi-Agent Systems to control Web of Things devices, generally where resilience and adaptiveness is needed

* **Current state:** We are in an exploratory state, gathering use cases, identifying research gaps, and building collaborations with other CGs
* **Target activities:** hackathons, plug fests, joint meetings with other GCs

* **Useful Documents:**

* [WebAgents CG Draft Charter](https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/w3c-cg/webagents/blob/cg-charter-draft/charters/webagents-cg-2023-draft.html)
* [2023 TPAC Position statements](https://github.com/w3c-cg/webagents/tree/main/Meetings/2023-09-11-TPAC/Statements)
* [WebAgents Materials on TPAC 2023](https://bit.ly/webagents-tpac2023)

### Solid and Web-based Multi-Agent Systems: Summary of discussions at the [Dagstuhl Seminar 23081](https://www.dagstuhl.de/23081) (presenter)

Presented by: [Andrei Ciortea](https://id.inrupt.com/andreiciortea), [Antoine Zimmermann](https://w3id.org/people/az), [Fabien Gandon](http://fabien.info), [Rem Collier](https://people.ucd.ie/rem.collier).

* [**Dagstuhl Seminar 23081**](https://www.dagstuhl.de/23081) — Three working groups were discussing bridges between Multi-Agent Systems and Solid based on the following scenarios:
* A scenario with Solid ecosystem in a decentralized hypermedia environment. Relevant questions included whether a MAS could regulate the use of the Solid ecosystem (e.g., enforce a norm), and how they could help with some task (e.g. indexing the content of the pods).
* A scenario for a building automation application, where occupants' personal information, context, and preferences are managed via a Solid ecosystem to drive the automation.
* A scenario where human and autonomous agents consume and produce information resources on the Web, e.g. in a social media platform. The purpose was to consider what kind of abstractions we need to consider for building MAS on the Web. Abstractions considered included:
* The notion of an agent that encompasses autonomous entities (people and software agents) that can autonomously consume and act upon Web resources. As the the Web extends to the physical environment (e.g. through the Web of Things initiative) more application
* Another notion discussed was the Agent Profile which serves as an embodiment of an agent on the Web for sharing details about the agent, including details about how to interact with the agent.
* Roots of the idea of an **Agent Profile** can be seen with the work on [**FIPA Agent Identifier (AID)**](http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00023/SC00023K.html), which can now be revisited with a fresh look based on input from the Solid community.
* Danai Vachtsevanou: Preliminary discussions on the use of Agent Profiles have also taken place between the WebAgents CG and the WoT CG/WG upon discussing the idea of **profiles for WoT Consumers** that exhibit higher autonomy. For example, this may concern consumers that do not follow a logic pre-defined during design time, but incorporate goal-driven and decision-making processes.
* (On the relation of Agent Profiles to **WebIDs**) Antoine Zimmermann: WebID is only part of the notion. The body of an agent is something you can sense and with which you can interact.
* Work of this Dagstuhl WG ended up being published as a [paper](https://emas.in.tu-clausthal.de/2023/papers/EMAS_2023_paper_2614.pdf) about embodiment of Agents in the Web through Solid pods (pod as body => pody)

* [**Dagstuhl Seminar 21072**](https://www.dagstuhl.de/21072) Autonomous Agents on the Web, Feb 14 – Feb 19, 2021 (the seminar report will be published on May 2023)

### Introduction to the Solid CG

URL: https://www.w3.org/community/solid/

Proposed by [Sarven Capadisli](https://csarven.ca/#i).
Presented by [Sarven Capadisli](https://csarven.ca/#i).

* SC: [Solid CG Charter](https://www.w3.org/community/solid/charter/)
* SC: [Solid Technical Reports](https://solidproject.org/TR/)
* SC: There is a [Solid WG charter proposal](https://solid.github.io/solid-wg-charter/charter/).
* SC: [Circumstances under which profiles are used or shared](https://solid.github.io/webid-profile/#use-cases).
* SC: Solid Project started mid 2010s at MIT. It aims to allow individuals to have more autonomy. Fixing the web can contribute to improvements in society. I will not go into social aspects, just focus on technical aspects.
* SC: We used to have panels in the past, now we transition more into a single group with possible short lived task forces. We still try to keep specs orthogonal when possible. The charter reflects the work we have been doing in last 4-5 years as CG. We have some work on [Solid QA](https://solidproject.org/ED/qa), having tests referring to exact things that are being tested. When we have community reports we can see how tests are build.
* SC: discussing [Solid CG Scope](https://www.w3.org/community/solid/charter/#scope)
* AC: One joint discussion point we have with the WoT WG is about "consumer profiles", which relates well to the profile descriptions for social and software agents. Perhaps this could be an interesting convergence point for the 3 groups.
* AZ: interface affordances is also something that can join the 3 groups
* SC: The focus of the group stays on technical aspects. Also whatever is going to be transitioned to proposed WG will stay under WG for the time of it's activity.
* SC: We are open to new work items as long as they fit under the scope. We can even have competing proposals being worked on at the same time.
* SC: discussing [Solid Technical Reports](https://solidproject.org/TR/)
* SC: Some of them are proposed to Solid WG (still under review) as deliverables.
* SC: We are trying to build on W3C QA work. Test cases will link to specific requirements in the spec.

## Open Discussion

* Andrei C: You mentioned discussion about profile descriptions for agents. We have discussion with WoT WG about 'consumer profiles', this could be an interesting discussion for all 3 groups.
* SC: There is a shared interest with profiles. Social Agent or Software. We are also looking into how those profiles are getting updated. We have a [Solid WebID Profile](https://github.com/solid/webid-profile) focusing more on social agent, less on software agent.
* eP: https://solid.github.io/data-interoperability-panel/specification/#agents talks about agents. Software agent would be acting on behalf of social agent, not on their own. They have interest in operating / offering as a service.
* AC: Autonomy is a broad concept. Generally aligned. Autonomy is more like a framework from an engineering perspective. For me it is useful to note the autonomy the agent has from the environment. Having these loose coupling helps autonomy as a relational notion. Various degrees of autonomy. Rather than calling automacity - acting on their own.
* eP: Access control can be enforced by the server. Software agent cant bear legal responsibility. So the legal consequences would apply to the social agent on behalf of who the software agant was acting.
* RC: We're aligned re autonomy social entity - a lot of the time we talk about autonomy as if independent from the environment.
* AC: Will look at Solid Notifications. We want to have a physical environment represented in RDF. Rather than subscribe to notifications, subscribe to notifications to a triple pattern. With more granularity.
* SC: We have one way of subscribing to resources. We also have considerations in place filter some specific changes. There might be some specific tagging that might be filtered or particular kinds of activities.
* AC: We also can have a triple pattern that goes across resources, so it can query across multiple resources.
* SC: You mention things which have been in our radar for years. Some of the have moved forward and some of them didn't. Besides existing work out there we don't have existing solutions.
* eP: Main challenge is around access control. Solid is using resource-level control. CSS does not implement any triple-pattern fragments. I believe ESS might provide Quad Pattern Fragments but only for the storage owner which has full access to all the storage.
* AC: [...relation of the question to agents' situatedness and agent perception as a bottleneck...]
* SC: I have a general question on how we can collaborate. It has to do with profile descriptions, describing agents or environments. Would you consider that web agents would be using solid as one of tangible strategies for storing data? Or are you interested how this data can be stored across different storage types and protocols?
* AC: This is a great question. We still need to discuss it. I can share my personal view which might not represent view of all the participants. I see need to decoupling application from data. When we go to WoT we need to work with hypermedia and possibly go outside of web protocols. One way to do that would be use of Linked Data. We also look at work done in WoT WG where hypermedia can be bound to different protocols. I mostly see it as decentralized hypermedia ecosystems.
* RC: ...
* AC: We would also be interested how far the solid can take us. From an architectural stand point what we can already address using solid and what else still has to be done. We need to start from some use cases, this would be first item we need to get done. We have one specific challenge identified with WoT WG about having manageable actions. If I have a long running action, how do I handle that on the client side. Another is about consumer descriptions. Another is to build linked interoperable web agents ecosystem.
* SC: [Solid user stories](https://github.com/solid/user-stories) repo. See [issues](https://github.com/solid/user-stories/issues).
* SC: Some of the work done in the interop and authz spaces could provide a foundation.
* SC: We are not trying to reinvent, come up with vocabularies or data models which would be better addressed in other CGs. For example privacy or terms.
* eP: Interested in use case overlaps. Describing agents and relations. Software agents acting on behalf of social agent. There can be different mapping. Also delegation re access controls. If I live for holidays, I want to grant a neighbor access to my house using some house assistant agent. Identification, authorization, delegation. All those UCs would be interesting to me.
* SC: CGs can meet to discuss specific topics, e.g., this slot we have for profile / delegation etc.
* AZ: We have a 4th co-chair, Ege Korkan, who is also co-chair of the WoT CG. We already have a strong overlap between the two groups.
* Sabrina K: I listened a lot but haven't contributed to any of the groups yet. I look forward to be more active in this space.
* Sabrina K: I joined a solid meeting a while ago but with all the panels i got impression that there are too many panels I need to pay attention and contribute to.