Ruben’s Blog| ruben.verborgh.org
Never mind the data economy. Data is unfit to form a proper marketplace: copyable goods cause an infinite supply that leaves a deeply confused demand. Meaningful trade only happens when two sides believe and expect they both stand to gain from every exchange. With data, it feels like some are always giving and others always taking. Is that because a broken marketplace makes trade fundamentally impossible? Yes. But this post is not a plea for giving up; it’s a focused manifesto for doing bet...| ruben.verborgh.org
Today’s websites and apps are built to compensate for an absence of trust, rather than to support its growth. Customers and companies both understand that human handshakes no longer scale in the digital age, and surrender to their replacement by a tap of the finger on a button labeled I accept. While every handshake comes with an expectation of honesty, this button never did: we know we are lying the moment we touch it, as does the author of the legalese no one expects anyone to read. Navig...| ruben.verborgh.org
Newspapers everywhere were quick to blame social media for some of 2016’s more surprising political events. However, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and unsubstantiated claims are as old as humanity itself, so Facebook and friends have at most acted as amplifiers. The real mystery is that, given our access to unprecedented technological means to escape those bubbles and chambers, we apparently still prefer convenient truths over a healthy diet of various information sources. Paradoxically, i...| ruben.verborgh.org
There’s no single optimal way to query permissioned data on the Web. Data publication and consumption processes are subject to multiple constraints, and improvements in one dimension often lead to compromises in others. So if we cannot successfully complete the quest for the perfect data interface, what is a meaningful way to make progress? Over the years, I’ve been ripening a conceptual framework to cast light upon such decisions and their interactions within an ecosystem. In this blog p...| ruben.verborgh.org
Data without context is meaningless; data without trust is useless. 2017-12-18 is nothing but a string—until it becomes a birthdate, a wedding, or the moment a security camera registered you. Handling such highly personal data requires trust. When your personal data is shared with someone, you must be able to trust that they will only use it in the way you agreed to. When someone receives your data, they must be able to trust that it is correct and that they are allowed to use it for the in...| ruben.verborgh.org
Who decides what your Solid pod looks like? For a long time, the answer has been the first one who writes, decides. That is, the first app to sculpt documents and containers in your pod determines where other apps need to look for data. Unfortunately, this creates an undesired dependency between apps, which now have to agree amongst each other on how to store things. Yet Solid promises apps that will seamlessly and independently reuse data in order to provide us with better and safer experien...| ruben.verborgh.org
Web services emerged in the late 1990s as a way to access specific pieces of remote functionality, building on the standards-driven stability brought by the universal protocol that HTTP was readily becoming. Interestingly, the Web itself has drastically changed since. During an era of unprecedented centralization, almost all of our data relocated to remote systems, which appointed Web APIs as the exclusive gateways to our digital assets. While the legal and socio-economic limitations of such ...| ruben.verborgh.org
We’re living in a data-driven economy, and that won’t change anytime soon. Companies, start-ups, organizations, and governments all require some of our data to provide us with the services we want and need. Unfortunately, decades of Big Data thinking has led many companies to a consequential fallacy: the belief that they need to harvest and maintain that personal data themselves in order to deliver their services and thus survive in the data-driven economy. This prompted a never-ending ra...| ruben.verborgh.org
Ever since Ed Sheeran’s 2017 hit, I just can’t stop thinking about shapes. It’s more than the earworm though: 2017 is the year in which I got deeply involved with Solid, and also when the SHACL recommendation for shapes was published. The problem is a very fundamental one: Solid promises the separation of data and apps, so we can choose our apps independently of where we store our data. The apps you choose will likely be different from mine, yet we want to be able to interact with each ...| ruben.verborgh.org
While the Semantic Web community was fighting its own internal battles, we failed to gain traction with the people who build apps that are actually used: front-end developers. Ironically, Semantic Web enthusiasts have failed to focus on the Web; whereas our technologies are delivering results in specialized back-end systems, the promised intelligent end-user apps are not being created. Within the Solid ecosystem for decentralized Web applications, Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies pla...| ruben.verborgh.org
Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?). Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need. This requires major changes in the way we develop applications, as we migrate from a closed bac...| ruben.verborgh.org