08 Oct 2018

Personal API

A journey into the decentralized web

In the last article we talked about datapods and how they give us control about our data. This article will go more in depth how we, other people, apps and websites can read and manipulate that data. I already mentioned Linked Data before, to access a specific piece of data we need the URL (Unified Resource Locator) to it. A URL identifies the location where the resource is located, an example query to get all my photos could be max.solid.com/photos. To access a specific photo or album I could just extend the query to point to a more specific location for example max.solid.com/photos/holiday_spain. If that query is standardized every app would know where to find my photos within my datapod and could show them to me. I could also place or generate something like a table of content into a folder and query that document to find all photos that I took in Spain. The same thing could also be done for documents whereby you store all your documents within you pod instead of your local PC, Dropbox, Google Drive or on other services. Solid also enables us to listen to changes of a specific resource. This way we can for example add songs we listen to within a month to a playlist dedicated to the month. Because that data is available online I can share that playlist with friends and they get notified when something gets added. I hope in the meantime your ideas sparked a bit and you are already thinking of all the things that are possible. Because everything is also connected using Linked Data there could be apps that recommend you new songs based on your preferences by just looking at your music library. These apps would compete against each other to offer the best service and the most accurate recommendations. You would also want to store your collected health data within your pod, this could include measurements and activities from your fitness tracker. You could then allow apps or even your doctor to access that data and give you recommendations to improve your health. All automatized and personalized as much as possible concerning to your saved preferences.