About the project
Project Name: PDS migrator
Move/copy data between Solid pods and leave breadcrumbs.
Team: Auke van Slooten, Ben Peachey and Yvo Brevoort
Our goal is twofold, first, make data movement easy on Solid. You own your data and it should be easy to pick it up and store it elsewhere. PDS migrator aims to make it very easy to move your data between providers. Supplier lock-in should be prevented for a good SOLID ecosystem. Also making it much faster for developers to test servers and apps for interoperability.
Website: pdsinterop.org
Achievements from the first phase of the DAPSI programme
In the PDS Migrator project, we’ve created a Solid Migrator application that allows you to move content from one Solid Data Pod to another. In so doing it leaves behind forwarding instructions for data that links to the old location. It does so by using a newly developed RDF ontology, called link-metadata. We’ve implemented support for these forwarding instructions in our PHP Solid Server, which means that if your original Data Pod is on the PHP Solid Server, then a Solid application that requests the original URL, from which you’ve moved your data, will automatically be redirected to the new location, on the HTTP fetch level. This means that the Solid application needs no changes to support this, it will just work. We’re now working on the Solid Server implementation for Nextcloud, so that it will also support this out of the box.
Finally, we’ve made a demo Solid application, which allows you to edit any linked data file. It will also allow you to move entities from one file to another, leaving behind a forward to the new location. This is in advanced stage and will be finalized in the next few weeks. We’ve presented our work to the Solid community and gotten good feedback, including from sir Tim Berners-Lee. We’ll continue our work with them to hopefully make this ontology a part of the Solid specification.
Achievements from the second phase of the DAPSI programme
In the DAPSI programme, we set out to create a way for Solid users to freely move their data from one storage provider to another. To do this, we did research on current solutions. We created an RDF ontology for data migration to describe the movement and redirection of data from one storage provider to another. This RDF is accompanied by a draft specification that exactly describes how storage providers should implement the ontology and what is needed to allow this data migration to happen.
The last achievement is proof that the solution we’ve thought up actually works, in a proof-of-concept implementation of the pod migrator, along with changes to the PHP Solid server and Solid-Nextcloud app to fully support the proposed RDF ontology and specifications.
Pitch
The DAPSI programme enabled us to work on Solid tooling. We joined a great number of sessions organised by DAPSI, ranging from infrastructure support, business awareness and community growth. Thanks to a number of online meetings with seasoned and experienced consultants from the DAPSI team, we learned to work on a business case for Solid applications. The one-on-one coaching sessions that Auke van Slooten and I had were of great value to discover different options available to create a thriving open-source ecosystem.
Yvo Brevoort
Entities
