Addressing ICT-24 with Web technology – Looking for collaborators

Dear all,

I'm a researcher in Semantic Web technology at Ghent University – imec, Belgium.

We're want to address the ICT-24 call with a Web technology stack, emphasizing:

• personal data spaces, i.e., a very large number of individual data pods on the Web with relatively few data.
  For example, every single person stores his or her own profile, posts, pictures, health data in a personal data pod with very strict access control.
• apps as interchangeable views, i.e., the data exists independently of the Web applications that use it, and data is shared across applications.
  For example, I enter my address book once in my own data pod, and it is used by Contact apps A, B, C, by Meeting Planner apps X and Y, and by a Birthday Reminder app Z.

The important part in this vision are separate markets for data and apps. I describe that vision in detail here: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/

The technologies we aim to use are:

• Core Web technologies (HTTP / HTTPS / URI, …) and output from related W3C working groups (micropayments, …)
• Linked Data (RDF / SPARQL / JSON-LD)
• blockchain – not as a holy grail / hype, but specifically as trust and incentive mechanism between personal data spaces

Our intention is to use the funding for three aspects:

• low-level technology / infrastructure, focusing on data pods and caching/replication
• many different decentralized applications on top of that infrastructure
• research into economic, legal, privacy aspects

We are looking for collaborators to help turn that vision into a strong consortium and proposal.

Let me know if you're interested!

Ruben