Community Bonding — Google Summer Of Code 2020 — Hydra Ecosystem

3 min readJun 18, 2020

I was selected as a Student Developer in Google Summer of Code 2020 program. I will be working with Hydra Ecosystem this summer. This is the first of the posts, I will be writing about my works during this period. This post is about my experience and work done in community bonding, the very first phase of Google Summer of Code.

For the past one month, I have been writing documentations and creating minor pull requests for Hydra Ecosystem. I got to learn a great deal about semantic web, linked data, JSON-LD, REST and Hydra in this one month and I am excited to learn even more in the time to come. We, at Hydra Ecosystem are aiming to build set of tools to automate REST APIs following principles of semantic web(Linked Data). For in-depth information please visit https://hydraecosystem.org

Briefly, semantic web is the new web where everything has meaning. The meaning which computers can understand. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners Lee asked us to put our documents on the web. And we did. Just like this document is. Now he is asking to put raw data on the web following the linked data principles. Imagine all the amount of data that go unnoticed, unprocessed which could be then brought to apply for greater good.

Hydra is a vocabulary for the APIs. Just like humans need vocabulary to communicate, to understand, hydra is a vocabulary which machines and humans both can understand. It formalises the concepts required to build RESTful APIs. It uses JSON-ld as a serialisation format. JSON-LD or JSON-linked data, gives the context to the data we are putting out on the web. Because, context plays a pivotal role in giving meaning. This is exactly the reason, search engines understand, this piece of data(string of 0s and 1s) is about an event you are going to attend, or this is a flight ticket. The search results will become meaningful unlike sometimes now when google gives around 200K results in 0.93s out of which not a single one is relevant. This is the tip of the iceberg we are talking about. There is a whole lot of possibilities. Imagination is the limit, perhaps.

During this period, I studied in depth how all the tools of Hydra Ecosystem are being used together and tried to figure out how they can be improved even more. I read the JSON-ld and hydra specifications and watched talks related to semantic web.

During this time, I set up my development environment and wrote some documentation and fixed minor bugs along the way along with the refactoring. Following are the PRs that I created during this period:

During pre-GSOC period, I got to learn a lot from the conversations with Lorenzo in the community channel and during the Community bonding period, I turned to Samesh and my mentors Akshay and Chris whenever I could not find answers on my own.

In the first two weeks I plan to automate the discovery of API documentation in the agent along with improving the UI/UX of the GUI of the agent.

Honestly speaking, I have always wanted to build tools that other people can use. I have finally found that opportunity to contribute to development on the tool, which I find extremely promising. By the end of coding period, I aim to build a python package that can be used by anyone to build smart clients that can understand any hydra powered api. I am glad, I get to play a part, however small, in the development of Semantic web.

Community Bonding — Google Summer Of Code 2020 — Hydra Ecosystem

Written by Priyanshu Nayan