Research group for Media, Innovation and Communication Technologies

Solid4Media: living lab for Solid-based media

Solid for Media (or Solid4Media) aspires to create a living lab environment for media in Flanders. The project focuses on three use cases: personal recommendations, trust through transparency and consent control and targeted advertisements.

  • Technology/media adoption and use
  • User experience & interfacing
  • User requirements

Project overview

This living lab explores and validates the potential of Solid (Social Linked Data) technology in a real media context, together with various media partners in a real media context and by actively involving a representative group of Flemish media users. The aim of decentralised technologies, such as Solid, is to create (1)  a privacy- and innovation-friendly media ecosystem through more and better data access and (2) a data economy and society that can guarantee public trust and socially responsible data use. The goal of Solid4Media is to migrate users' media profiles to a Solid pod infrastructure and provide existing and new media services from there.

The project focuses on three important use cases identified by Flemish media stakeholders:

  • personal recommendations (e.g., by enriching with cross-domain data)
  • trust through transparency and consent control
  • targeted advertisements (e.g., by linking purchasing behaviour and advertising campaigns)

By practically realizing a Solid infrastructure, the technical feasibility and scalability of a future-oriented decentralized media infrastructure will be investigated. Also, the concrete added value such an infrastructure can offer for existing and new media services, both from a business and end-user perspective, will be examined.

Role of mict

We at imec-mict-UGent are proud to participate in this living lab project, and we will:

  • User profiling. Explore how users and groups of users (e.g., family) want to control, manage and customise their personal data (pods) for enhanced media services.
  • Adoption potential. Explore how users perceive the new opportunities that arise when sharing data with others (e.g., in a family context).
  • Dashboarding. Develop user-friendly and trustworthy interfaces, visualisations and storytelling for media pods and pod-based media services.
  • User journeys. Develop appealing and effective user journeys to accompany users to use personal data stores in various media scenarios maximising personal utility and minimising potential friction.
  • User evaluation. Investigate the impact of personal media pods on users’ quality of experience, trust, user engagement and user connection.

Project details

Partners: VRT, Datavillage, Flanders Data Utility Company and imec research group IDLab

Duration: April 2023 – April 2026

Contact: dr. Kristin Van Damme and dr. Peter Mechant