Re: Evolution of the RWW -- a Temporal Web -- Towards Web 4.0 (?)

> On 17. May 2021, at 20:53, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Mon, 17 May 2021 at 19:50, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
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> > On 17. May 2021, at 03:33, Nathan Rixham <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
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> > A loosely coupled immutable timestamped record of state changes allows deployment of resources to be broadly tech and protocol agnostic. For example several previous states of a document could be stored on IPFS, with the stateless protocol HTTP providing the most recent state, and a chain exposing timestamped pointers to the previous states.
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> You can also get quite far just by adding link between version states using memento for example.
> I am trying that out in the new Solid Server I am putting together. There are comments in the code here:
> https://github.com/co-operating-systems/Reactive-SoLiD/blob/master/src/main/scala/run/cosy/ldp/fs/Resource.scala#L223
> 
> Thanks Henry
> 
> This looks interesting, I've had a look at the comment you pointed to, and it looks interesting, tho I didnt understand it fully
> 
> Would it be possible to describe in a couple of sentences for those that are not intimately familiar with memento

I have not implemented memento fully myself. It builds on rfc5829 and allows one to link to archives that keep
copies of versions, though the server can be it’s own archive I believe.

> 
> I can imagine a work stream for a temporal web based on this approach, if there's interest
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> The thing that particularly interests me is what I'll term quite vaguely, a web-scale temporal web.  What I mean by this is, that the timestamp operation (aka the witness operation) is global scope and not local.  Meaning if any one website goes down, the timestamping record will still be there allowing a reconstruction of the history.  Providing resilience.  In 2021, we have specialized time stamping servers (commonly referred to as pubic block chain) which can provide this time travel type functions.  From your comment there is a time travel in memento too.  In any case, interested in your findings, if you'd like to share ...

I think there is a clear need for any read-write web server such as Solid to keep versioning information,
just to help restore versions in case a buggy hyper-App writes some data.  That use case does not require
global consensus on version states. So I think that is local versioning will clearly be the first
priority. Trellis-LDP implements somehting like this too, so I am following in the footsteps to get a
better understanding of it.

Global consensus is expensive.  For some applications that cost is acceptable. There
is a good reason bitcoin is the most successful application of such ledgers: the exchange of
coins is a mathematical operation that is easy to verify. Emprical operations are very
different beasts - dual one could even say.


Henry Story

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