Under the name SolidLab, over the next four years imec and several Flemish universities are investigating the feasibility of decentralized data lockers as a building block of an innovative data-driven economy in Flanders.
The idea behind Solid is to decouple apps and data from each other. Through decentralized data vaults, people can store their personal data and decide for themselves with whom to share it. Prof. Ruben Verborgh (imec/UGent) is working with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, on the project with the aim of building disruptive innovative services in media, healthcare and for government services, among others.
Imec cites the example of linking Solid to the Citizen Profile. That way, for administrative purposes, you only have to store your data once in a private data vault. Then when you are asked for national register number, date of birth, address, degrees, career, loans, and so on, you can have all the fields filled in automatically.
Or you could run different route-planning apps on the mobility data you have stored in your data vault. And for purposes around personalized health care, you could collect both your clinical data and data from fitness tracking devices and choose with whom to share it.
Four-year project
Solid is an important decentralized step towards the data economy, but before it gets there, a lot of technological and societal questions still need to be answered. To this end, imec research groups at UGent (IDLab and MICT), VUB (SMIT) and KU Leuven (COSIC and DistriNet) are joining forces under the name SolidLab Vlaanderen. PIXLES (UGent) and CiTip (KU Leuven) join the new consortium for legal research.
The Flemish government is investing 7 million euros for the first two years of this four-year project. The researchers will make their developments freely available in the form of white papers, scientific publications and open source software. An SDK (Software Development Kit) will also be developed that allows companies to easily read and write data to and from the data vault.
Because data vaulting is a new thing for a lot of people, work is also being done on a clear user interface. Unlike the confusing privacy questions (cookie and consent messages) people get today when they visit a Web site, the underlying system should clearly show what data is or is not being shared.
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