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

💡 In simple words: "Structured data" means organising information so computers can read it and connect it, like putting a clear label on every box so the right machine can find what is inside. On WikiDeal, some data is private (your identity, your bank details, photos of a flat you want to rent out) and some data is public on purpose (the content of contracts people choose to publish, whether a contract was signed or completed, and overall usage statistics). One idea guides the whole effort: your habits and your commercial behaviour are not for sale. It is a bit like nobody being allowed to walk into your head or your home: what you buy, how you behave, and your private practices stay yours. To picture it, think of a babysitter who keeps their own qualifications and references and can show them to a family when asked, without any platform storing or reselling them.

⚠️ 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

Concept origin	Linked Data / Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C
Status	Research, early prototype

This page describes a research direction, not a delivered feature. Everything below states what WikiDeal aims at, intends to explore, or holds as an initial hypothesis. Nothing here is implemented yet.

Aspects covered on this page

Structured Data is explored through several connected aspects, each a section below:

Why it matters (your habits are not for sale)
What data are we talking about (private vs published)
Three intended guarantees (private by default, per-transaction control, trust circles)
Anonymized statistics for the common good
Data minimisation and local-first
Decentralised identity and the Decentralized Web
Selective disclosure
Data governance: future hypotheses

Why it matters

On most platforms today, if a service is free, the user tends to be the product: behaviour is collected, analysed, and resold. WikiDeal is guided by the opposite principle. The intention is that there is no resale of users' habits or commercial tendencies, because the data is meant to belong to the users themselves.

Put plainly, the goal is that nobody, no other User Group, not the Ynternet.org Foundation, not the WikiDeal operator, gets to walk into your head or your home. Your buying patterns and private commercial practices are meant to stay yours.

A concrete illustration: a babysitter could hold their own qualifications, background-check results, and reputation history, present them to a family on request, and have them verified without the platform storing the underlying data. The same logic is intended to apply across the marketplace.

What data are we talking about

WikiDeal handles two distinct kinds of data, and the intended rules differ for each.

Private data. Identities, contact and bank details, personal photographs, the details of a dwelling someone wants to rent out, and the specific variables a user enters into a contract. The design is guided by a simple principle: private data stays private by default, and the user decides whether to share it, with a specific counterparty in a negotiation or with a chosen Ring of Trust.

Published data. Some data is meant to be public on WikiDeal: the content of contracts the parties choose to publish, the state of a contract (signed, completed, or ended in a dispute), and aggregate usage statistics. This data is published on purpose, not collected and resold.

The structured-data work intends to cover both kinds (expressing them as RDF, JSON-LD, and Wikidata-linked resources) so each piece of information carries the right status and is machine-readable and interoperable. Governance of all this is intended to be decided in a participative context, not dictated from above.

Three intended guarantees

Structured Data aims at giving users the assurance that they sit inside trust networks (Rings of Trust) where they decide whether or not to share their data. Three guarantees sit at the heart of the design.

Private by default. The intention is that your data would not be accessible, not by other User Groups, not by the Ynternet.org Foundation, not by the WikiDeal operator. Nobody would see it unless you explicitly grant access. Access would be opt-in, scoped, and revocable.
Per-transaction control. For each transaction, you would decide what to reveal and to whom: more for a high-stakes deal, less for a casual one, transaction by transaction.
Choose your trust circles. You would 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 could store a member's structured data (photos of dwellings to rent, plus account and bank details) on a third-party server, because the user chose to trust that Ring. Sharing would follow the trust relationship the user opted into, not a platform-wide default.

Anonymized statistics for the common good

Separately from personal data, WikiDeal intends to publish anonymized aggregate statistics. Personal data would stay private; only de-identified trends would be shared. The point is decision support: helping people and communities make informed decisions.

Today, this kind of trend data (which is highly valuable, because it reveals tendencies and reactions) is largely held by a few large private groups. WikiDeal aims at bringing this insight back under public, community control, so that trends can be understood and their impact studied rather than quietly monetised.

This is intended to open work with the academic world (for example doctoral research) on concrete questions, such as:

how far certain usage ergonomics (UX patterns) are linked to compulsive buying;
what real impact discounts and promotional offers have on users' finances.

The double goal is guided by two interests at once: supporting providers of goods and services, while protecting consumers from mechanics that push them to lose their commercial good sense, and, more broadly, strengthening trust in the system.

Aggregate figures would reveal broad trends and recurring conflict patterns, which in turn would let the community create alerts and improve contracts and safeguards before problems spread. In no case would specific user information be exposed, only listed aggregates such as: how many contracts of a given type were signed, how many were completed, how many ended in a dispute, what type of dispute, and how many disputes were solved.

Data minimisation and local-first

WikiDeal is designed to be guided by minimising the platform's access to user data. Where mainstream platforms treat user data as a primary asset, collecting, analysing, and monetising it, WikiDeal intends to treat data as belonging to users, held only in trust, for minimum periods, in minimum quantities.

The architecture WikiDeal is exploring is local-first: wherever possible, data would be stored on users' own devices, and only the minimum necessary information would be transmitted to shared Infrastructure. As an initial hypothesis, a babysitting agreement signed by both parties would live on the devices of the family and the babysitter, while the platform Infrastructure would hold only a cryptographic proof that the agreement was signed, not its content, unless both parties consent to shared storage.

This direction is technically challenging (it requires careful design of conflict resolution, backup, and recovery) but it aims at changing the data power relationship: a platform cannot sell data it does not have. The intention is that, even when WikiDeal eventually serves many babysitters, tutors, and freelancers, it would not have built a surveillance corpus of intimate human behaviour.

Decentralised identity

WikiDeal is evaluating decentralised identity approaches (DIDs, verifiable credentials) that aim at enabling trust between strangers without a central identity database. As above, a babysitter's qualifications and reputation could be held by the babysitter, presented on demand, and verified without the platform storing the underlying data. This research is ongoing through the WikiDeal Living Labs programme.

Decentralized Web

WikiDeal is following the general development of the Decentralized Web closely, with or without blockchain. WikiDeal starts from a deliberately technology-neutral position: this is a starting point, not a settled stance. Positions on specific technologies are intended to be taken later, on the basis of exchanges, discussions, and position papers, some of which already exist and others still to be written. These are among the elements to be studied, rather than decisions already made.

The goal being explored (user-owned, consent-based, portable data) could be approached through several paths, kept here as research references rather than adopted building blocks:

Solid Pods (Tim Berners-Lee's model of personal data stores, where each user owns their data and grants applications scoped, revocable access).
Holochain (an agent-centric distributed framework where each participant keeps their own validated data and shares it peer-to-peer, with no global ledger).
IPFS-style content addressing, and, where genuinely useful, distributed ledgers.
Third-party / federated hosting, where structured data could live on a trusted third-party server chosen by the user.

For an overview of this wider field, two external observatories are useful references:

Awesome Decentralized Web (a curated list of decentralised protocols and tools, notably excluding crypto/blockchain/NFT projects).
Decentralized Web Summit (the Internet Archive gathering that has tracked this field since its early days).

This connects to WikiDeal's broader stance: see Blockchains & Smart Contracts for where blockchain and smart contracts are (and are not) considered appropriate, and Decentralized Data for the data-minimisation principles that underpin the approach. By expressing data as open linked resources, WikiDeal aims at keeping the door open to interoperate with these infrastructures as they mature, so the platform's information could stay open, portable, and owned by its community rather than locked into a single provider.

Selective disclosure

For marketplace Transactions, WikiDeal is exploring a selective disclosure model: parties would share only the data necessary to complete a Transaction; reputation scores would be computed locally and verified without revealing the underlying ratings; and dispute resolution could proceed without exposing private communications to the operators unless legally required.

Funders' individual contribution data is intended to stay strictly confidential. Aggregate figures (total number of funders, total CHF raised, distribution of Community vs Cash Rewards allocations) would be published transparently; individual allocations would never be disclosed without explicit consent.

Data governance: future hypotheses

The following is an initial hypothesis about digital socio-politics, offered as a projection of possible results in the event of large-scale deployment, not as a roadmap.

If WikiDeal were deployed widely, data governance might generate broad tendencies within the Rings of Trust. It is possible that these tendencies would become a new form of political positioning, much as we have left and right, or conservatism and progressivism. In matters of data workflow, society might one day see, for instance, "libertarians" (favouring maximum user freedom) and "protectors" (favouring stronger built-in safeguards).

Within such a spectrum, it is possible (not certain, and not "will be") that hosting and advertising choices would also become selectable, for example free hosting with advertising, paid hosting without advertising, and community-defined options in between. The guiding hypothesis is that protection would be complete by default, and that users could then choose to reduce some protections in exchange for advantages offered by commercial groups under citizen supervision. The point would be choice, with no single data or advertising regime imposed on everyone.