Simulated Decentralized Social Media Playground
Keywords: Linked Data, Querying, RDF, SPARQL, Webdevelopment, decentralization, Javascript, Typescript, social media
Promotors: Ruben Verborgh, Ruben Taelman
Students: max 1
Problem
In recent years, decentralization of data on the Web has been a topic of interests due to recent problems related to privacy and censorship.
However, decentralized data complicates the development of applications, since pieces of data needed by applications can be spread across tens or hundreds or servers.
As such, query engines are being developed to abstract access to such data behind query algorithms.
To evaluate the performance of these query engines, a fictional social network-based benchmark has been developed, called SolidBench.
Up until now, questions remain with respect to how developer-friendly these query engines are to interact with decentralized data.
Goal
The goal of this thesis is to build a Web-based user interface on top of SolidBench that simulates the interactions of a social media application.
To evaluate the effectiveness of existing query engines, this application should only interact with SolidBench by issuing read/write queries to the query engine.
Concretely, you will
- setup a simulated social network using SolidBench,
- develop a Web application to interact with this simulated social network
- by letting the Comunica query engine execute SPARQL queries.