An approach to implementing ESPRESSO’s decentralized private search on Dataswyft: feasibility and high-level design

This article presents a high-level design of an approach to privacy-preserving search in the Dataswyft decentralized data cooperative, where data is subject to differential access control. The ESPRESSO experimental search framework is the first approach to query processing in decentralized, federated or Linked Data systems that takes differential access control into account. The ESPRESSO approach has already demonstrated its efficacy for search in Solid, an open-source protocol for decentralized private data cooperatives. Dataswyft is a proprietary platform with an approach to data governance that is diametrically opposed to that of Solid. In this article, we describe how the differences in these approaches to data governance have impacted design decisions at the earliest stages of prototyping. The high-level design which we present in this article, and which we will implement over the coming months, will advance the ESPRESSO approach towards greater interoperability.