Advancing the protocol with web concepts from Tim Berners-Lee's Solid

[tomhgmns]

Pre-submission Checklist

• I have verified this would not be more appropriate as a feature request in a specific repository
• I have searched existing discussions to avoid duplicates

Your Idea

Dear MCP team,

In the last seven years, my company has worked on the Solid specification of Tim Berners-Lee.

I see lots of similarities between what MCP and what Solid tries to accomplish: let people share data with apps (or AI) regardless of where this data is stored.

Solid aims to facilitate this by standardising APIs, including resource discovery. It does so by extending OpenID connect and using URIs to uniquely identify data types and users. There is an access control rule specification based on these concepts. It is also possible for apps to ask and retrieve access to certain data.

Here is a video that quickly explains the workings in an easy way:
https://youtu.be/CqI15zs1NHw?si=PlklF6k1HLf5V4OX&t=35

Yet, things didn't go that smooth in the specification process. Several companies had to develop their own dialect because there was no effective governance structure to reach consensus.

Our dialect is described here: https://docs.use.id/docs/start-here

The differences and similarities between those dialects are described in our documentation: https://docs.use.id/docs/useid-and-solid

I think that the Solid specification and the work that we have done can serve as inspiration for the MCP protocol.

Do you think that concepts from Solid might be useful?

If so, our company would be happy to collaborate and participate in advancing the MCP protocol.

Kind regards,
Tom Haegemans
Co-Founder and CTO of Digita and use.id

Scope

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Features
• Documentation
• Developer Experience
• Other

[jspahrsummers]

I took a look at Solid (and your video—thank you) and although I see some superficial resemblance with the discussion of resources, it really seems quite different at heart to me. MCP is not really intending to solve any decentralization problem, just to provide a convenient way to plug'n'play different AI-powered applications with outside integrations.

I could be wrong, though. Do you have some proposal in mind for how the two should fit together?