What is Web 3.0?

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

In this video we'll talk about the current step in the evolution of the Web, or as it is being referred to now, Web 3.0.

To get to 3.0, we had to start with Web 1.0 which was built as a distributed file system where organizations and people created and shared mostly static web-pages. These pages were  in turn linked to other resources on the web. The goal of this system was to put information out there and share it with others. 

Web 2.0 became more interaction focused, web applications took off, and connecting people was the new goal. We discussed both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in more detail in our earlier videos, which you can find linked in the description. In that earlier exploration we saw some gaps in Web 2.0 such as lack of user agency, inhibited interoperability, and skewed data governance, as data pertaining to a given entity is scattered across various organizations and application databases.  

This list is not exhaustive, but it serves to illustrate that improvement is needed, which is where Web 3.0 comes in. Its goals are to address the Web 2.0 gaps and hopefully even go beyond that.

Solid is a technology that achieves the goals of Web 3.0 by organizing data, applications, and identities on the web. 

At the core of Solid is the idea of decoupling these three elements from each other and standardizing the interactions between them. 

Standardizing each of these domains enables interoperability. We discussed interoperability in our earlier videos, so if you want to learn more check out the link in the description. Having a standard way to interact between these three domains allows for reduced effort and greater communication between applications, users, and data, across organizational boundaries. Standards also enable things like universal single sign-on across applications and services, significantly lowering the amount of data duplication through account creation.

Decoupling data from identities and applications allows organizations to focus on business logic and value as opposed to data integrations, scraping, and reconciliation.

The Solid platform is a W3C Open Web Standard based on a set of open specifications. It prescribes a way for applications, identities, and data to effectively interact with each other with minimal friction while being independent of each other. Orchestrating such a separation provides new opportunities to develop, and deploy highly configurable and flexible applications and services at scale.

So how does this work? Let's consider each core element individually and start with identities.

Solutions like WebIDs are already gaining traction for identifying entities on the Internet. 

WebID in tandem with the Solid access control specifications enables simple yet granular privacy controls over entity data. It also allows us to connect data to the entity that it describes regardless of where this data is physically stored.

This in turn enables a variety of different relationships to emerge. 

For example, if a person is looking for guarantees around confidentiality between themselves and trusted parties, like sharing their medical records with their doctor, or their finances with their bank, or accountant, they can have the option to grant access to trusted parties and applications at any time through their access control settings. They can also have the option to reject or revoke access to those applications and services should they choose to do so. 

Such a system can provide transparency and visibility into which organizations have access to data and what that data is being used for, which protects the individual’s data rights and complies with modern data legislation. 

We'll talk more about access controls, WebIDs and how they work in later videos. For now let's look at how data in Solid is decoupled from applications. 

Solid Pods are personal data stores that provide a place to access, update and share data for entities. This in itself is a significant shift in data governance, enabling entities to move away from the world of scattered data silos which are tied to applications, and into the world of distributed and interconnected data that is centered around entities instead. 

Now that data is separated from the applications via Solid Pods, we need an interoperable data standard that any application can work with, lessening the complicated API dependencies that applications have to build on today. Data in Solid Pods is enriched with context and made interoperable using Linked Data and a standardized API through the Solid Protocol. We discussed Linked Data in our earlier videos, which you can find in the links in the description. 

This data standard implemented across all Solid Pods enables application interoperability, which means that multiple applications can leverage, reuse and enrich the same data. This can be used in a variety of ways. Some of the key benefits of this approach are reduced data duplication and management, and higher quality and quantities of data.

Another application for this distributed data model through the Solid Protocol is a direct relationship between people and organizations. Solid Pods enable users to intentionally and proactively share their data directly with organizations thereby reducing the organizations need to rely on third party user data or scrape and reconcile data. From a user experience perspective, Pods help users avoid duplicating information in forms online and help with faster onboarding and signups, allowing for establishing new relationships with services with just the click of a button. This direct approach to data exchange between users and organizations improves their relationship and establishes a foundation of trust. 

Last perspective that we'll mention in this video is the usage of Solid Pods to gain a 360-degree view of user data which can act as a single source of truth for the users or organizations working with user data. A 360-degree view means consistent aggregation and ingestion of diverse information types about a single entity centered in their Pod. This boosts knowledge discovery and efficient data-driven analytics to understand a company’s relationship with customers and personalize marketing, products, and services.

Now with identity mechanisms being responsible for authentication, and Solid Pods taking care of storage, applications can focus on building features. Spending significantly less time and resources on identity and data management if any time at all. We'll discuss how application architecture and feature development changes in Web 3.0 with Solid at play in our later videos. For now let's recap what we discussed so far. 

The web’s evolution is focused on addressing issues like data governance, user agency, and application interoperability. Solid technology is at the core of this transformation.

Solid enables organizations and users to benefit from application interoperability, and 360-degree view of user data.

Solid allows the data infrastructures within and across organizations to utilize all or some of those listed benefits while simultaneously making their infrastructure flexible and customizable. So when policies and regulations change, they are able to quickly adapt how they manage data in order to comply with those changes.

With Solid, users and other entities are able to uniformly identify themselves on the web, with the help of WebIDs,

Solid Pods are personal data stores that allow us to decouple data from applications, and grant users the ability to consent to where their data is stored, how it is collected, managed, and accessed. 

Thank you for watching!

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