What is a Solid Pod?

Hi my name is Yulia and I'm a curriculum engineer at Inrupt.

In this video we'll talk about Solid Pods. We'll define what a Solid Pod is, and consider its place on the web, and its potential.

Solid Pod is a personal data store which contains data about a user or entity.

This means not only the data that they knowingly generate like pictures, text, and search queries but also data that they generate by using applications, such as: their location, behavioral and search patterns, and brand preferences. 

All of this data is stored in the Pod using Linked Data Principles, making it machine readable, rich in context, and easy to navigate for any application that gains access to it. 

Speaking of access, an entity with a Solid Pod is able to allow applications, organizations, and other entities to access this data. Much like today, where a phone owner gets to set the permissions for which apps can access location, microphone, and contact data. A user with a Solid Pod can consent to share and is able to view which organizations and apps have access to their data.

An entity can have multiple Pods, where data is organized by its purpose and access requirements. For example, a person can have a medical data Pod, financial data Pod, and let's say media streaming data Pod. Each of these data categories have their unique regulations, access patterns, and context. Medical data has to comply with HIPAA regulations, financial and credit card data must comply with PCI security standards, and media streaming data falls under GDPR laws as does any personal identifiable information. These differences are a good reason to consolidate similar data in a dedicated Pod.

Another reason to consolidate related data into separate Pods can be the usage patterns of the data. For example, in our earlier videos we talked about a scenario where a person has multiple streaming service subscriptions. A user can give access to their media or streaming data Pod to the streaming services. This way their browsing and viewing preferences are stored in a dedicated media Pod, so that when they start to use another streaming service the user will no longer have to manually populate a new account. All they will have to do is grant this new streaming service access to the existing viewing history in their Pod, and they’ll start receiving recommendations that are tailored for them. This allows for viewing data across services to accumulate over time, providing a much more comprehensive picture of a user's preferences and how they evolve over time.

For our last example in this video we'll use a Pod dedicated to government data. It would make sense to have a separate Pod pertaining to government services, because the access and usage patterns for this Pod are different from a medical or media Pod. Users are not able to issue a driver's license or house title to themselves, and just put it in a Pod. Those resources are issued and verified by official government entities, which means that while the data is stored in the user's Pod, it can not be modified directly by them. Given this guarantee of issuer and non-tampering, which Solid Pods support, the users can consent to sharing this data with other organizations, should they need a way to provide their driver's license to an insurance company, or present some other official document digitally.

Pods have built-in mechanisms to provide different levels of access controls for their owners. A Pod provider should leverage these access control capabilities for users based on a number of factors, like the data protection policies that they are constrained to and the purpose of the Pod in question. 

We'll dive deeper into discussing access controls in a later video, when we learn about the Enterprise Solid Server. Let's get back to learning about what's in a Pod.

Data in a Pod is organized as resources and containers. We can liken them to files and folders on your personal computer where resources are like files, and containers are like folders. Resources can be any form of data ranging from videos, photos, text, structured or unstructured; really anything that you can store or generate online can be stored in a Pod. Containers, for example, are also resources that simply contain other resources. As a result, users can navigate their Pod similar to how they navigate their files on a filebrowser.

Pods are a key part of the Solid model, but in order for these innovative services to function safely, securely, at scale and in compliance with data laws we need additional capabilities built around them. 

In the next video, we'll talk more about the Solid ecosystem - what it entails and how to get started with it. You can also find more information about the possibilities that Solid Pods bring about by watching the videos linked in the description. For now, let's recap what we talked about in this video. 

Solid Pod is a personal data store which contains data about a user or entity. Pods enable a different model of information exchange on the web, where the applications request access to personal data, and are able to reuse data that other apps have generated all with explicit user consent. An entity can have multiple Pods, where data is organized by its purpose and access requirements.

Thank you for watching!

‍