Glossary
For questions around the concepts and terminology specific to Solid, refer to https://solidproject.org/faqs .
Access Control List
An Access Control List (ACL) is a Resource that controls users’ level of access ( { read: <boolean>, append: <boolean>, write: <boolean>, control: <boolean> } ) to a Resource. For example, it can list rules like “ https://jcaesar.solid.community/profile/card#me can read this Resource”, and “ https://cleopatra.solid.community/profile/card#me can read this Resource and its children”.
Access Control Policies
One of the access control mechanisms that can be used with Solid. See Access Control Policy (ACP).
Access Control Resource
Each Pod resource has an associated Access Control Resource (ACR) that contains the policies that determine access to the Pod resource.
The lifecycle of the ACR is bound to the lifecycle of the Pod resource; that is:
When creating a resource, ESS creates a corresponding ACR.
When deleting a resource, ESS deletes the corresponding ACR.
If a resource has no Policies that apply to it, the resource is inaccessible. However, the Pod owner can add new policies to provide access to the resource.
Access Grant
A signed credential that can be used to access Resources stored in a Pod. See Access Requests and Grants for more information.
Access Request
A signed request that is requesting access to one or more Resources stored in a Pod. See Access Requests and Grants for more information.
Agent
A user. Agent typically refers to a person but could also refer to an organization, a bot, etc. An Agent is identified by a WebID.
Access Modes
The types of access that have been granted: Read Access , Append Access, Write Access.
Access Management Application
A trusted application for managing access to data in a Pod. The application allows the user to respond to Access Requests, view granted access and revoke access. Inrupt provides a reference component that demonstrates the features and UX of an access management application. See Authorization Management Component (AMC) for details.
Append Access
Access to add data to the applicable Resource.
Client
An application; also referred to as client application. Can be Web-based, server-based, CLI tools, etc.
Client Identifier
A URI/IRI that uniquely identifies a client application. For Solid, the Client Identifier dereferences to a application/ld+json document.
For information on WebID-based authentication for client applications, see The Client ID Document.
Control Access
Access to view and manage who has access to the applicable Resource.
Applicable to the ACL authorization system.
Container
A special type of Resource that can contain other Containers as well as RDF Resources (SolidDatasets) or Non-RDF Resources. Technically, a Container is itself a SolidDataset.
A Container is analogous to a folder on your file system.
For example, given a Resource at https://cleopatra.solid.community/profile/card , both https://cleopatra.solid.community/profile/ and https://cleopatra.solid.community/ are Containers.
The URL for a Container ends with a slash / .
For more information, seeStructured Data.
Default access
Rules defining Access Modes that apply not to the Container Resource directly, but are inherited by its children, their children if applicable, and so forth.
Enterprise Solid Server (ESS)
Inrupt offers an enterprise-grade, production ready Solid Pod server called the Enterprise Solid Server. ESS' microservices architecture enables simple scaling, high performance, and support for highly available deployment configurations. ESS is part of Inrupt's Wallet Infrastructure.
Extended Profile
An RDF Resource , stored in an Agent’s Pod, that contains data about the Agent. The extended profile is complementary to the WebID Profile .
Unlike a WebID Profile which, by definition, is publicly readable, an extended profile may or may not be publicly accessible (for reads or writes) based on the Agent’s discretion. That is, the Agent can specify access to the extended profile like any other resource in the Agent’s Pod.
For more information, see https://solid.github.io/webid-profile/#extended-profile-documents .
Fallback ACL
If a Resource does not have an explicit Resource ACL of its own, the Fallback ACL is the ACL of the Container closest to that Resource that does have its own explicit Resource ACL. Only the Default access rules in the Fallback ACL apply.
IRI
Internationalized Resource Identifier. An IRI is similar to standard web URI but allows for internationalized characters such as the umlaut Ä , or the Greek letter Δ . See also IRI Wikipedia page.
IRI is similar to URI but uses a Universal Coded Character Set, whereas URI is limited to US-ASCII character set.
In the documentation, these terms are used interchangeably.
ISO-8601
A global standard for representing time values.
Mutual TLS
A method for mutual authentication in network connections, involving the presentation and verification of digital certificates.
Non-RDF Resource
Any non-RDF binary or text file, such as .pdf , .jpeg , etc.
Pod
Storage location for personal data. Users manage the access to data stored in their Pods.
Resource
The data sent to you when you type a URL into a web browser. A resource can be an RDF Resource or a Non-RDF Resource.
Resource Owner
One or more agents with control access to resources in a Pod.
Resource ACL
The ACL that applies to a given Resource. If none exists, the Fallback ACL applies.
Read Access
Access to view the contents of the applicable Resource .
RDF Resource
A Resource Description Framework (RDF) document whose contents consists of statements that describe a some subject by its relationships and have the following form:
<subject> <predicate> <object> .For more information, see RDF.
SolidDataset
Representation of RDF Resource as a set of Things . For more information, see Structured Data.
Thing
A data entity, e.g., a person. A Thing is associated with a set of data or properties about the Thing, e.g., name , date of birth , address , etc.
A Thing is saved as part of a SolidDataset , where a SolidDataset is a set of Things . For more information, see Structured Data.
Turtle
An extension of N-Triples. In addition to the basic N-Triples syntax, Turtle introduces a number of syntactic shortcuts, such as support for namespace prefixes, lists and shorthands for datatyped literals. Turtle provides a trade-off between ease of writing, ease of parsing and readability. (Source)
URI
Uniform Resource Identifier is the official name for those things you see on the Web that begin http: or mailto. For example, http://www.w3.org/ is the URI for the home page of the World Wide Web consortium.
IRI is similar to URI but uses a Universal Coded Character Set, whereas URI is limited to US-ASCII character set.
In the documentation, these terms are used interchangeably.
Verifiable Credential
Set of claims (i.e., the credential) that can be verified.
See https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/#credentials.
Verifiable Presentation
Wrapper around one or more Verifiable Credentials.
Verifiable Presentation can also contains a subset of data from Verifiable Credentials or data synthesized from Verifiable Credentials.
See https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/#presentations.
Web Access Control
One of the access control mechanisms that can be used with Solid, based on Access Control Lists . See Manage Access to Data (WAC) .
Wallet Storage
The storage mechanism of personal data for a wallet. Inrupt's system uses Pods for storage.
WebID
A URI/IRI that uniquely identifies an Agent. The Resource found at the WebID can provide more information about the Agent.
For more information on WebID URL, see https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/identity/#dfn-webid.
WebID Profile
The RDF Resource obtained when dereferencing the WebID . The WebID Profile may be stored separately from the Agent’s Pod.
For more information, see https://solid.github.io/webid-profile/.
Write Access
Access to add (i.e. append), update, and delete contents of Resource . Granting Write access automatically grants Append Access .
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