solid-gate/README.md

Solid Gate

Hosted, multi-tenant Walder with a community template hub.

What is this?

Solid is great for storing your personal RDF data in a pod you control. The problem: every app that wants to read your data needs to speak LDP, understand your specific vocabularies, and parse RDF. Almost none do.

Solid Gate is the hosted service layer on top of Walder — a tool that builds websites and APIs on top of decentralized knowledge graphs. Walder proved the concept. Solid Gate productizes it: multi-tenancy, Solid OIDC auth per user, cache invalidation via Solid Notifications, and a community hub of one-click templates for common transformations.

Think of it as SPARQL-Anything in reverse: SPARQL-Anything lets you query arbitrary formats as if they were RDF. Solid Gate lets you serve your RDF as if it were any arbitrary format.

How it works

1. Authenticate — grant Solid Gate read access to your pod via Solid OIDC
2. Deploy a template — pick one from the community library or bring your own
3. Get a stable URL — your transformed data is cached and served at a permanent endpoint
4. Stays fresh — Solid Notifications trigger recomputation when your pod data changes; stale cache served in between

Your Solid Pod  →  Solid Gate (Walder)  →  stable URL (RSS / iCal / JSON / ...)
                          ↑
                 community template
                (or bring your own)

Example use cases

• Bookmarks → RSS — publish a "what I'm reading" feed from your pod bookmarks
• Events → iCal — expose your RDF event data to any calendar app
• Contacts → vCard — bridge your pod contacts to legacy address book apps
• Any RDF → REST API — give legacy apps a familiar interface to your pod data

The community hub

The template library is the core value. Common transformations are one-click deploys. Power users publish their own. Think Vercel for Walder configs.

Deployment

Self-hosted

Coming soon.

Hosted

Coming soon. Authenticate with your Solid identity, deploy a template, done.

Status

Early design phase. Part of the Aleph Garden personal semantic web project.

Prior art

• Walder — the engine underneath; research prototype from IDLab/KNoWS (Ghent). Proved the concept, never productized.
• SPARQL-Anything — the spiritual mirror of this project
• ActivityPods — ActivityPub + Solid combined; adjacent but different problem