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ESPRESSO: A Framework for Empowering Search on Decentralized Web

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Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2023 (WISE 2023)

Abstract

The centralization of the Web has led to significant risks to privacy, security, and user autonomy, prompting the need for decentralization. Solid is a set of standards, protocols, and technologies that seeks to enable Web re-decentralization based on the existing W3C recommendations. In Solid, users store their data in personal online data stores (pods) with full control and sovereignty over which individuals and applications get access to them. However, the current state of the Web and Web-based applications rely heavily on search functionality using centralized indices. This poses significant challenges when it comes to searching or querying large-scale data stored in decentralized user-controlled pods, where different individuals and applications have varied access to data. To address this gap, we propose the ESPRESSO framework, which aims to enable individuals or applications to search Solid pods at a large scale while pod owners maintain control over access to their data. ESPRESSO considers access rights and caching needs while facilitating the performance of distributed queries. Our framework offers a vision for empowering search utilities in the decentralized Web, utilizing the Solid framework, and opens up new research directions for future decentralized search applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://solidproject.org.

  2. 2.

    WebID specification https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/identity/.

  3. 3.

    Web Access Control specifications: https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl.

  4. 4.

    IBM GaianDB https://github.com/gaiandb/gaiandb.

  5. 5.

    https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/restful-api/.

  6. 6.

    https://comunica.github.io/comunica/.

  7. 7.

    https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/chaitanyakck/medical-text.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by EPSRC (EP/W024659/1).

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Correspondence to Mohamed Ragab .

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Ragab, M. et al. (2023). ESPRESSO: A Framework for Empowering Search on Decentralized Web. In: Zhang, F., Wang, H., Barhamgi, M., Chen, L., Zhou, R. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2023. WISE 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14306. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7254-8_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7254-8_28

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