Introduction

Hello everyone,

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Andrei Sambra and I am both a W3C Team member as well as a post-doc researcher at MIT. In this group, however, I choose to participate with my MIT affiliation.

My work at MIT revolves around topics that fit this group very well. Together with Tim Berners-Lee, I currently lead a project called Solid [0], which aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy for the users. Key aspects of this project involve re-thinking core concepts of the Web -- such as identity, authentication, access control and data storage (persistence) -- so they can operate in a decentralized but safe and privacy respecting way (fits very well with the current use cases outlined by this CG). If you are interesting in finding more information about the motivation and goals, please read this blog entry [1] I wrote a few months ago.

The main reason why I joined this CG in the first place is because the end goal of our project is to produce standards. The Solid project is currently trying to stay as close as possible to existing standards, be that RECs or work-in-progress (CGs/WGs). Among them we use the Linked Data Platform (LDP) [2] for our data API and WebID [3] for cross-domain user identity. We initially decided to also use WebID-TLS [4] for cross-origin, password-less authentication, but the recent deprecation of the KEYGEN element as well as several UX issues has forced us to look for alternatives.

I hope the team behind the Solid project can contribute to this group, both in terms of producing valuable use cases as well as implementations.

Best,
Andrei

[0] https://github.com/solid/solid
[1] https://deiu.me/blog/?post=https%3A%2F%2Fdeiu.me%2Fblog%2Fposts%2Fsolid-an-introduction.ttl
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/
[3] https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/identity/
[4] https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/tls/

--
Andrei Sambra
World Wide Web Consortium - MIT
Cambridge, MA
Tel. 617-324-8267