The Community Solid Server: Supporting research & development in an evolving ecosystem

The Solid project aims to empower people with control over their own data through the separation of data, identity, and applications. The goal is an environment with clear interoperability between all servers and clients that adhere to the specification. Solid is a standards-driven way to extend the Linked Data vision from public to private data, and everything in between. Multiple implementations of the Solid Protocol exist, but due to the evolving nature of the ecosystem, there is a strong need for an implementation that enables qualitative and quantitative research into new features and allows developers to quickly set up varying development environments. To meet these demands, we created the Community Solid Server, a modular server that can be configured to suit the needs of researchers and developers. In this article, we provide an overview of the server architecture and how it is positioned within the Solid ecosystem. The server supports many orthogonal feature combinations on axes such as authorization, authentication, and data storage. The Community Solid Server comes with several predefined configurations that allow researchers and developers to quickly set up servers with different content and backends, and can easily be modified to change many of its features. The server will help evolve the specification, and support further research into Solid and its possibilities.