Solid Cockpit: Data manager, privacy editor, and query facilitator for Solid pods

Solid, a decentralized Web-based personal data storage protocol, enables users to store, manage, and share data in a flexible and user-controlled manner, especially for sensitive data. Despite this promise, practical interaction with Solid Pods remains difficult because existing applications only cover fragments of the overall workflow, while common tasks such as permission management and cross-resource querying still require substantial technical knowledge. We present Solid Cockpit, a browser-based interface for managing and querying Solid Pods with a particular focus on privacy-transparent sharing workflows. Beyond basic Pod data management, Solid Cockpit contributes two draft technical specifications for currently under-supported tasks in the ecosystem: auditable permission-change notifications and Pod-native storage of query results. The application combines (i) data management, (ii) a visual privacy editor with integrated permission-change notifications, and (iii) an embedded SPARQL querying component with example queries, query history, and result materialization. We position the system against related Solid user interfaces and architectures and illustrate how notification support fits into a high-level sharing workflow. The demonstrator is deployed online at https://knowledgeonwebscale.github.io/solid-cockpit/

@inproceedings{crum_demo_solidcockpit_2026,
  author = {Crum, Elias and Buelens, Bart and Ertaylan, Gokhan and Taelman, Ruben},
  title = {Solid Cockpit: Data manager, privacy editor, and query facilitator for Solid pods},
  month = may,
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd Extended Semantic Web Conference: Posters and Demos},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://ecrum19.github.io/eliascrum/publications/papers/eswc-2026-demo-paper.pdf}
}