Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Innovations:Structured Data

💡 In simple words: WikiDeal organizes its information so computers can read and connect it easily — like labelling every box so anyone can find what is inside. But the most important rule is simple: your data belongs to you. You decide who can see it. On WikiDeal, you are not the product.

⚠️ Not yet approved. This page describes a proposal that is still under community review. It is documented here so it can be discussed, improved and endorsed.

Structured Data (Linked Data)

Innovation — WikiDeal R&D

Origin	🌐 Tim Berners-Lee / W3C
Status	Prototype 1 — In testing

Why it matters — in plain words

On most platforms today, if it's free, you are the product: your data is collected, analysed, and resold. WikiDeal is built on the opposite principle. There is no resale, no surveillance business model. You pay a small subscription (CHF 1/month) — and in exchange you are not the merchandise. That is the core difference.

Concretely, Structured Data exists so that users have the guarantee that they are inside trust networks (Rings of Trust) where they themselves decide whether or not to share their data. Three guarantees sit at the heart of this:

Private by default. Your data is not accessible — not by other User Groups, not by the Ynternet.org Foundation, not by the WikiDeal operator. Nobody sees it unless you explicitly grant access. Access is opt-in, scoped, and revocable.
Per-transaction control. For each specific transaction, you decide what to reveal and to whom. You can share more for a high-stakes deal, less for a casual one — the choice is yours, transaction by transaction.
Choose your trust circles. You can affiliate with the Rings of Trust you actually trust for data sharing. For example: a User Group offering a hosting service for tenants and landlords can store a member's structured data — photos of the dwellings they want to rent out, plus account and bank details — on a third-party server, because the user chose to trust that Ring. Sharing follows the trust relationship the user opted into, not a platform-wide default.

A participative range of data policies

None of this is dictated from above. Data governance on WikiDeal is decided in a participative context, and there will be a spectrum of selectable policies — from more libertarian (maximum user freedom) to more protective (stronger built-in safeguards). Communities and users choose where on that spectrum they want to sit.

This spectrum also covers advertising and hosting choices. Users will be able to choose their hosting model, for example:

Free hosting with advertising, or
Paid hosting without advertising,
and other community-defined options in between.

The point is choice: no single data or advertising regime is imposed on everyone.

Anonymized statistics for the common good

Separately from personal data, WikiDeal publishes anonymized aggregate statistics. Personal data stays private; only de-identified trends are shared. This lets the community see, for example:

how many babysitting contracts or bike-rental contracts were signed;
how many were completed end-to-end;
how many ended in a dispute, and what type of dispute.

These aggregates reveal broad trends and recurring conflict patterns — which in turn allow the community to create alerts and improve contracts and safeguards before problems spread. Insight for the commons, without exposing individuals.

Strategic technology choices

The guarantees above are not just policy — they rest on deliberate technical choices. WikiDeal's Structured Data layer publishes information as RDF, JSON-LD and Wikidata-linked resources, enabling semantic interoperability, federated search, and machine-readable transparency, in line with the original Semantic Web vision.

On top of that open, linked-data foundation, WikiDeal works in the context of the Decentralized Web (DWeb):

Solid Pods — Tim Berners-Lee's model of personal data stores ("Pods"), where each user owns their data and grants applications scoped, revocable access. This directly implements "private by default" and "you decide who can see it".
Holochain — an agent-centric distributed framework where each participant keeps their own validated data and shares it peer-to-peer, with no global ledger. This matches consent-based track records and trust built gradually within Rings of Trust, rather than through a central surveillance database.
Third-party / federated hosting — structured data (e.g. rental photos, account details) can live on a trusted third-party server chosen by the user, consistent with the per-Ring trust model above.

Decentralized Web (DWeb) — with or without blockchain

WikiDeal follows the general development of the Decentralized Web closely, with or without blockchain. We are deliberately technology-neutral on this point: the goal (user-owned, consent-based, portable data) can be reached through Solid Pods, Holochain agents, IPFS-style content addressing, or — where genuinely useful — distributed ledgers. We adopt what serves the user, not what is fashionable.

This connects to our broader stance on distributed ledgers: see Blockchains & Smart Contracts for WikiDeal's position on where blockchain and smart contracts are (and are not) appropriate, and Decentralized Data for the data-minimisation principles that underpin the whole approach.

By expressing its data as open linked resources, WikiDeal keeps the door open to interoperate with Solid Pods, Holochain agents, and other DWeb infrastructures as they mature — so the platform's information remains open, portable, and owned by its community rather than locked into a single provider, and so that the user, never the data broker, stays in control.