BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

Awakening the web of self-sovereign data with ESPRESSO: a scoping review of Solid’s and Dataswyft’s readiness for decentralized private search

Oliver, Helen and Ragab, M. and Savateev, Y. and Tiropanis, T. and Poulovassilis, Alex and Chapman, A. and Roussos, George (2024) Awakening the web of self-sovereign data with ESPRESSO: a scoping review of Solid’s and Dataswyft’s readiness for decentralized private search. In: International Conference on AI and the Digital Economy (CADE 2024), 24-26 Jun 2024, Venice, Italy.

[img]
Preview
Text
CADE_2024_OliverEtAl_Camera_Ready_final_8Aug24.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

Download (657kB) | Preview

Abstract

The Internet in 2024 has become a mechanism for turning users into suppliers of data to third parties, a disappointing descent from the noble origins of the World Wide Web. Human-generated data becomes fodder for artificial intelligence to devalue human intelligence at scale. To take back control, one approach is for “self-sovereign” users to store personal data in servers of their own, and let third parties come to them for access, which the data owner grants selectively and granularly. This is the private, decentralized, re-idealized Web. Solid provides a manifesto, a solution, and a protocol for this re-idealization. Before Solid came Dataswyft’s Hub-of-All-Things, a personal data ecosystem with a similar philosophy of self-sovereignty, developed from the perspective of exchange of personal metadata as an economic asset. However, barriers to adoption of private personal online data stores threaten the survival of these systems. The original World Wide Web was globally adopted because the power of search made it irresistibly useful in everyday life. The ESPRESSO project is developing ways to infuse the private, decentralized Web with the same power. In this scoping review we investigate the search-readiness of Solid and of Hub-of-All-Things using the ESPRESSO framework.

Metadata

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information: ESPRESSO is supported by EPSRC grants EP/W025868/1 and EP/W024659/1. Major sections of the ESPRESSO codebase were written by Reza Moosaei. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising. No new data were created during this study.
Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Internet, data privacy, meta data, artificial intelligence, Information networks, Data security, Database management systems (DBMS), Knowledge based systems, Distributed databases
School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Research Centres and Institutes: Birkbeck Knowledge Lab
Depositing User: Helen Oliver
Date Deposited: 26 Mar 2025 12:52
Last Modified: 10 Jun 2025 15:47
URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54311

Statistics

6 month trend
10Downloads
6 month trend
35Hits

Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

Archive Staff Only (login required)

Edit/View Item
Edit/View Item