From a liberal-arts perspective, I was curious about the concept of Web 3.0, and if such services existed, where the participants who use them begin and end, and under what interests and conditions those participants form the flow between one another. I am well aware that my thinking is still quite inaccurate and extremely humanities-leaning and biased, but I am putting this together in the hope of growing one step further through unflinching errors, brave corrections, and mature acceptance.
The Background of Web 3.0
Many of the applications we use form their markets on the basis of user inflow, ad exposure, and click counts. The many useful? services that we are used to being free, with no cost attached, are already being traded by those services, not as products but as people (the users' information), without us even wanting it.
If you're pay for the product, then you're the product
"If you don't pay for the product, you are the product." This is the most frequently repeated quote from the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.
In the current era where AI is developing rapidly, user data—whether in free or paid services—is being traded in semi-forced, semi-voluntary, passive ways without our knowing. But Tim Berners-Lee, who first invented the World Wide Web, did not want things to flow this way and argued for a different course for a long time. The world, however, did not unfold as he hoped. So in the end, he launched a new project: Solid.
The Project, SOLID (Social Linked Data)
The concept of Solid is simple: 'The user can have full control over their own data.' Applications do not handle the users' data themselves. A company is merely an agent that combines its own data with the information the user permits to provide the service the user wants. Through this, individuals can use applications without losing their data.
But in reality, this is not easy. Who would willingly give up the user data they already have and the structure that keeps that data? Through institutions or campaigns, it is clearly impossible. But if we approach it from the application side, I think it can be made possible. Like iTunes, like the beginning of the App Store. The mobile market is only about ten years old. In the first year it was belittled negatively; for the next four years it was overwhelming. And from the fifth year on, it simply became taken for granted.
To realize this idea there is a basic infrastructure (concept) designed for it, the Solid pod Solid pod. As mentioned above, it is the key structure (concept) that makes the idea of 'users having full control over their own data' real.
Solid calls a participant an Agent. And not only individuals but also organizations or institutions can become Agents and each be allocated a pod. The way the Agent's data (called a Resource in Solid) is stored is in a "pod" allocated as the individual's online data store. Note that many third parties operate pods and pod servers as personal online data stores. And each pod server is connected to the others.
Basically, pods are composed in a modular (decentralized network) way. So they don't have to be bound to a single category. They don't have to share one server. That's why, as in image 7) later on, without visiting any particular application directly, you can search various applications through your pod and easily set what access permissions to grant each one.
And once more,
to realize this idea there is another basic infrastructure (concept) designed for it, namely WebID WebID (a unique, single sign-on). Through this, data registered on one server can access or set permissions on each piece of data stored in different pods or on different pod servers.
Of course, for data to become independent of any application, the same information must be consistently understandable across every app. So, to make the data reusable, it has to be describable in a widely used, well-known vocabulary (a standard language or specification).
For this reason, the data stored in a pod is managed in a format called a Document. Here, the concepts of profile and ontology come in. The ontology part feels ambiguous for a part 1 overview so I'll skip it, and the profile will come up again later. Roughly, it takes the form of a document structured so that data can be reused well here and there (a 'you-and-me-connecting link', where the link in form or quantitatively is the webID, and in meaning or qualitatively is content written to a standard format).
Now, here's an example of Web 3.0 applied to a case…
1. Hong Gil-dong is in good health. But he needs a loan. Through an app (one that has Solid applied), Hong Gil-dong grants access to his personal credit rating and health information to several bank and medical-field Agents near where he lives, via his pod.
2. A bank needs to promote a loan product. A bank employee, through an app (one that has Solid applied), reviews the list of prospective customer Agents who have granted them access. Among those relatively low-risk, healthy, high-credit customers, they narrow the list down and recommend personalized interest-rate product information for each customer.
3. Hong Gil-dong, hearing the app's notification, opens the app's InBox (which is probably better interpreted as a 'channel' rather than simply a mail box; the app might, for instance, present the UI as a chat rather than email). He then compares financial products offered by various bank Agents and proceeds with the loan.
A world where each individual is respected (not merely served) with their own uniqueness as they are—this was, I've heard, once called Hongik Ingan in some long-ago era of ours. It's a pity to hear of it now through blue-eyed white folks, but even so, my expectations are quite high. Of course, I'm an N-type person. So behind this scenario I always imagine a 'musical chairs' game once more. Even if there are nine people and nine chairs, it doesn't mean everyone can sit down. What the sapiens…
WebID
The way a certain agent grants another agent content access to a resource is by authorization using a web-address style.
*Permissions: read, write (optionally also del), append, control (all permissions)
The interpretation of a symbol can change depending on context.
Components of WebID
1. agent (as a uri)
- user
- application
- group
2. resource (as a url)
- data… : the part where permissions are granted
Separation of app and data (Solid's intent) → as a result, auth has to be placed outside the app.
- pod = (data) resource server
- WebID auth = simply* checks whether I possess that uri
A uri or url simply for authentication, checking whether I hold 'service.com/user'
→ Authentication via a protocol (OAuth2.0 > Open ID Connect): aiming at a url that returns something ( discovery* guaranteed — shared)
3. (profile) document (as a url)
- private docs, public docs
- a document about the resources of an agent
discovery required fields**
- inbox
- root container
- …
- abc-d
ontology list
- Each has its own address, xml.rog/…/foaf/v1.0
- Expresses words and their meanings
- (height → abc-d) Used for web-to-web communication (?…semantic)
Examples
1) Below is the process of installing an app and receiving a WebID. The user installs an app on the (Play or) App Store uploaded by a provider such as inrupt.net and solidcommunity.net (implemented to the Solid Project specification), and through this receives an allocated pod.
2) You can also use profiles created through multiple pods instead of just one. Besides 'inrupt' built directly by Tim Berners-Lee himself, there are many pods built and operated to the Solid spec. And each pod is interconnected (in a form similar to blockchain).
3) The types of agent (uri), which is a WebID component, include not only user but also application or group.
4) Below is a brief depiction of the authentication process. It follows the same process and authentication method as the single sign-on we already know. The difference is that the user-related data is managed not by the service (Google, Naver, or KakaoTalk) but by the pod and pod server.
5) A user agent can create multiple profiles (WebIDs), and with each profile can sign up for each service (more precisely, grant the service access to some part of my profile information).
6) A user agent can create multiple profiles (WebIDs), and can sign up multiple profiles to a single service. If applied, this would likely be useful for YouTube or OTT service use.
7) As in 2) above, with multiple pods connected to pod servers, a user Agent can search for other Agents and set access permissions for those Agents. For example, you could search for Kakao (if it had WebID applied) and sign up for (set permissions on) Kakao or unsubscribe. The structures are not the same, but a similar real-world scenario might be a modern version of the government service where, once you enter your resident-registration number, you get a list of services you have subscribed to, and can unsubscribe from some of them right there on the spot.
Personally, 7) feels as though, if www in the past was a link for connecting the data contained in a page (and agent information), Solid's proposal is a link for connecting the agents (data and permissions) contained in a page.
For that reason, when it is properly reflected in W3C (though it may already be there, or done deftly), I hope that when an agent (user) and an agent (application, group) exchange permissions, or when an agent (application, group) is first registered, the process includes grasping and verifying the type and adds a step of enforcing a default for permission settings. Without a nudge for the biased or habitual behaviors of the user, I feel that a very convenient feature could become a very dangerous one.
Exercise 01
https://normalstory.tistory.com/entry/cursor-IDE-coding-test02
cursor IDE_coding test 02 - Solid 프로토콜
프롬프트 @https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol HTML과 JavaScript를 사용하여 1) 로그인 버튼 클릭하면 Solid 프로토콜을 사용하여 로그인 기능을 구현해줘 2) 단, 로그인 팝업창과 메인 윈도우간 통시 에러를
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Part 2..
Thinking about it, even without going all the way back to Hongik Ingan, I find myself wondering whether things that feel distinctly Joseon-like (community and grassroots culture such as dure and pumasi) are in fact most aligned with the original spirit of Web 3.0—the original spirit of the web. I have come to think that Web 2.0 might have been a distortion born out of neoliberal thinking, which held that the best course was to split and subdivide every act and every value, turn them into cash or exchange value, and through that create an inexhaustible cash (financial) flow.
If you look closely, there are services in use now with Web 2.0 only as infrastructure, whose structure is similar to this. That service is, in fact, a national-level app, but in its search for a revenue model it has expanded and grown toward other uses rather than its original function. Even before we feel any inconvenience with its original function, it has become familiar and become universal.
Collective bias born from the mixing of individual biases is a truly fearsome thing.
책 | 사물의 소멸. 우리는 어떤 세계에 살고 있나
개인적으로 최애 작가? 철학자인 한병철 님의 신간이 나왔음을 도서관에서 우연히 알게 되어 바로 책을 빌려 읽으며 잠깐 잠깐 들었던 몇 줄의 문장과 몇몇의 생각을 기록해본다. 서문. 소설 에
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