ConSolid: A federated ecosystem for heterogeneous multi-stakeholder projects

Semantic Web, vol. 15, pp. 429–460

Abstract

In many industries, multiple parties collaborate on a larger project. At the same time, each of those stakeholders participates in multiple independent projects simultaneously. A double patchwork can thus be identified, with a many-to-many relationship between actors and collaborative projects. One key example is the construction industry, where every project is unique, involving specialists for many subdomains, ranging from the architectural design over technical installations to geospatial information, governmental regulation and sometimes even historical research. A digital representation of this process and its outcomes requires semantic interoperability between these subdomains, which however often work with heterogeneous and unstructured data. In this paper we propose to address this double patchwork via a decentralized ecosystem for multi-stakeholder, multi-industry collaborations dealing with heterogeneous information snippets. At its core, this ecosystem, called ConSolid, builds upon the Solid specifications for Web decentralization, but extends these both on a (meta)data pattern level and on microservice level. To increase the robustness of data allocation and filtering, we identify the need to go beyond Solid’s current LDP-inspired interfaces to a Solid Pod and introduce the concept of metadata-generated ‘virtual views’, to be generated using an access-controlled SPARQL interface to a Pod. A recursive, scalable way to discover multi-vault aggregations is proposed, along with data patterns for connecting and aligning heterogeneous (RDF and non-RDF) resources across vaults in a mediatype-agnostic fashion. We demonstrate the use and benefits of the ecosystem using minimal running examples, concluding with the setup of an example use case from the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) industry.

Authors 5

1. Jeroen Werbrouck corresponding Aachen Chair of Design Computation

   Ghent University · IMEC · RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Design Computation, RWTH Aachen, Germany

   Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium

   IDLab, Department of Electronics and Information Systems, Ghent University – IMEC, Belgium

2. Pieter Pauwels

   Ghent University · Eindhoven University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium

   Department of the Built Environment, TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands

3. Jakob Beetz Aachen Chair of Design Computation

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Design Computation, RWTH Aachen, Germany

4. Ruben Verborgh

   Ghent University · IMEC

   Affiliation as printed

   IDLab, Department of Electronics and Information Systems, Ghent University – IMEC, Belgium

5. Erik Mannens

   Ghent University · IMEC

   Affiliation as printed

   IDLab, Department of Electronics and Information Systems, Ghent University – IMEC, Belgium