One of the core ideas behind solid is to make data independent from applications, so that one can be in control of his/her own data and share it with the apps of his/her choice. For this to be possible, the same piece of data must be understood consistently from one app to another. This requires agreeing on the meaning of the data, as conveyed by its description. Therefore, to make data reusable, it should be described with vocabularies that are widely used and known. This section of the documentation aims to help you navigate through the main concepts of using vocabularies to describe your data, and to build applications on top of that.

To address right away the elephant in the room, in the world of Linked Data, vocabularies can also be called ontologies. Don’t be afraid by this: as far as we are concerned, an ontology is just a vocabulary used to describe data.

For a quick first experience, you can go through our quickstart vocabulary tutorial:

• create a vocabulary,
• publish it on your Pod,
• describe some data,
• and get coding.

For a more in-depth tutorial, if you have an idea for an app, you can go through the following steps:

• First, look into well-known vocabularies: maybe you don’t need to build your own
• Second, you might want to search vocabulary catalogues for more specific vocabularies. Again, the purpose here is as much as possible to avoid each app coming with a new vocabulary. Using existing vocabularies for concepts that are already described will make interoperability easier
• Once you are sure that you need it, build your own vocabulary
• If you want your vocabulary to be reused, publish it, along with associated artifacts
• Finally, learn how to build your app using your vocabulary in your code (tutorial under construction)!