Solid Symposium 2023: Decentralised applications – from health care to supply chains

The motto of the Solid project is: "Your data, your choice. Advancing Web standards to empower people". The Solid specifications are based on partly semantic web technologies and follow a decentralised architecture.

The "Solid Symposium 2023" of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg FAU and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS took place at the end of March under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Andreas Harth. The solid community met in Nuremberg to discuss the latest developments around this future infrastructure for data portability and data sovereignty. The symposium provided a forum for researchers, early adopters in business and government, and the web community to present the current state of the art around Solid and exchange ideas for further developments.

Solid: Infrastructure of the future for data portability and data sovereignty

The different panels dealt with different aspects around Solid and highlighted the current developments from different perspectives:

• Effects of Decentralised Health Data in Society, Politics and EU Data Initiatives
• Applications for Health Data Management with Solid
• Solid Potentials and Challenges in Industrial and Logistics Scenarios
• How Personal Knowledge Graphs Could Revolutionize Our Lives
• Identity Management, Authentication, and Authorization in Solid
• Trusting Decentralised Knowledge Graphs and Web Data
• Solid and Disruption: Business Models

Read more about Solid in our magazine series

In our magazine series, we'll introduce you to Solid: You'll learn more about its architecture and technologies - as well as the vision for Web 3.0 - and get to know the Solid community. The symposium series also gives you an insight into the breadth of the program, reflecting the state of research as well as applications and business models around Solid.

We wish you an insightful read! If you have any further questions or need advice, or if you are interested in a joint research project, we would be pleased to hear from you. Please contact us!

Solid heralds the future of the World Wide Web: Social Linked Data. In the following article, you will learn more about Solid and its technologies and dive deeper into the topic with participants of the symposium. You will meet Prof. Dr. Andreas Harth, Timea Turdean and Michiel de Jong, who share their enthusiasm for Solid with you as members of the community. The accompanying video provides impressions of the symposium, which took place at the Augustinerhof in Nuremberg.

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Professor Andreas Harth is chair of Technical Information Systems at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and head of the Data Spaces and IoT Solutions department of the Fraunhofer IIS Center for Applied Research on Supply Chain Services.

His research is devoted to new solutions for data spaces and the Internet of Things (IoT) that allow data to be processed independently of its original application and system constraints, thereby rendering it portable. His research focus is on developing methods and technologies for decentralized information systems, e.g., in the World Wide Web or blockchain environments, and their implementation in companies. In the course of numerous research projects in collaboration with industry, he has studied data integration, e.g., using Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies, and interaction between components, e.g., by means of process modeling languages. Applications for these methods and technologies range from the Internet of Things and the Web of Things to the field of Industry 4.0.