Building on ideas developed by an open source software project called Solid, Inrupt promises a website where people can use single sign-on for any service and personal data is stored in “pods,” or stores. of personal data online, controlled by the user. .
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British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was knighted for inventing the Internet navigation system known as the World Wide Web, wants to remake cyberspace.
With a new startup called Inrupt, Berners-Lee aims to address some of the issues that have crippled the so-called open web in an era of huge closed platforms like Facebook.
Building on ideas developed by an open source software project called Solid, Inrupt promises a website where people can use single sign-on for any service and personal data is stored in “pods,” or stores. of personal data online, controlled by the user. .
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“People are tired of the lack of controls, of silos,” said Berners-Lee, co-founder and CTO of Interrupt, in an interview with the Reuters Next conference. This new updated website, Berners-Lee said, will enable the kind of person-to-person sharing and collaboration that has helped major social media services succeed while keeping the user in control.
John Bruce, a technology veteran and CEO of Interrupt, said the company signed the UK National Health Service (NHS), the BBC and the Flemish government in Belgium as pilot customers, and hoped to announce many more. ‘others by April.
Investors in Interrupt include Hearst Ventures, Octopus Ventures, and Akamai, an internet content delivery company. Bruce declined to say how much has been collected.
Bruce said the NHS pilot was tackling the long-standing problem of incompatible medical records. With Inrupt, he said, the NHS could give everyone “a holistic presentation of your medical history,” with various doctors and other service providers able to update this record even if it remains under the control of the user.
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A key goal of Interrupt is to get software developers to write programs for the platform. Inrupt, like the original web, is essentially a set of protocols for machines to talk to each other, meaning specific applications bring it to life.
“The use cases are so vast it’s like a redesign of the web,” said Berners-Lee.
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