Real-time Collaboration in Linked Data Systems

Real-time collaboration has become commonplace in centralized Web applications, but decentralized Linked Data systems still lack readily accessible mechanisms. This demo paper proposes a novel approach that provides a viable solution to implement collaborative Linked Data in the Solid ecosystem using Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and hypermedia-driven interaction. Specifically, we introduce a dedicated vocabulary for describing interactions with CRDT-based resources hosted in Solid Pods, empowering software clients to dynamically discover means for collaborative editing at run time. In contrast to current solutions for collaborative RDF, our approach works in combination with industry standard CRDTs to offer a seamless co-editing experience in decentralized Linked Data systems. To demonstrate the practicality of our approach, we showcase a Solid-hosted website that utilizes the vocabulary to expose hypermedia controls and a browser extension that effectively consumes these descriptions to enable real-time collaborative editing through CRDTs. By strategically shifting intelligence to the client-side, our approach significantly lowers the entry barrier for publishing real-time collaborative resources on the (Semantic) Web.