Introduction¶

The future Internet will separate prerogative for data control, application control and network control. (Internet Society, 2019). The future Web will enable each agent’s prerogative for autonomous data control. (Tim Berners-Lee & Ruben Verborgh, Inrupt, 2019). This decoupling of data control from functional applications is based upon the prerogative of individuals and entities for fine-grained management of their data resources.

Xalgorithms Foundation has convened the collaborative design of the Data With Direction Specification along with a set of operational reference implementations under 100% free/libre/open licenses.

A specification is considered generalizable where there are at least three working reference implementations using different platforms and programming languages.

A reference implementation consists of working software under free/libre/open licensing that demonstrates usability, purpose and intended operation. Priorities are ease of maintenance and personnel on-boarding, whereas genuine deployments prioritize for performance.