Tim Berners Lee’s Inrupt launches Solid privacy platform for enterprises

World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee’s startup Inrupt today announced an enterprise version of its privacy platform, Solid.

To give you a quick brief about Solid, it is a new project by Berners-Lee taking place at MIT that aims to change the way Web applications work today, which would result in true data ownership as well as improved privacy. Solid, which is derived from "social linked data" is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. It focuses on three principles, which include true ownership of data, modular design and reusing existing data.

Inrupt CEO John Brue today announced that the company was publicly releasing the enterprise-grade version of Solid to organisations and their development teams. He said that its pilot partners, which include BBC, NatWest Bank, the UK's National Health Service, and the Flanders Government had already started using this technology to build new products and services. 

For instance, the NHS is empowering patients with their own medical data to improve people’s health and lower care costs. The BBC and NatWest are finding that a user-centered approach to trust and data opens doors to smarter service delivery. And the Flanders government is about to prove that Solid can transform an entire citizen experience. Now, organisations across the globe will be able to do the same.

“These first major deployments of the technology will kick off the network effect necessary to ensure the benefits of Solid will be appreciated on a massive scale. Once users have a Solid Pod, the data there can be extended, linked, and repurposed in valuable new ways,” Berners-Lee explained in a blog post.