Learning Solid

Solid is a draft specification and is changing rapidly. As such, a large part of the educational material we've developed in the past, is out of date. Currently, we're in the process of updating this material.

In the meanwhile, we advise you to do the following:

Solid is a draft W3C specification that is based upon several existing (web) standards. Because of this, we have noticed that to learn Solid, one should consider going through three stages.

First, we advice everyone to start by understanding the building blocks of Solid (i.e. the web standards). Next, we advise you to take a look at the draft specification. Finally, we would recommend you to start looking into the development of the specification at the Solid Github.

To get you started with the first stage, we recommend you to get familiar with several topics by going through the WebID and Solid Primer and reading relevant parts of the following books:

  • Richer, J., Sanso, A., (2017) OAuth 2 In Action, Manning Publications
  • Allemang, D., Hendler, J., Gandon., J (2019) Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist - Effective Modeling for Linked Data, RDFS, and OWL, ACM Press

For the second stage, we recommend you to go to the main specification page. This page points to other subspecifications like Solid OIDC, Shape Trees and many more. We advise you to read through those subspecifications (and their primers) and give priority to the following ones:

  • Solid OIDC
  • Access Control Policy
  • Shape Trees
  • Solid Application Interoperability
  • Solid Notifications Protocol

For the third stage, we recommend you to look at the following panels and their repositories on Github:

Feel free to let us know how you learned Solid and what worked for you. This way we can bundle experiences and provide even better guidelines!