A new blockchain ecosystem for trusted, traceable & transparent ontological knowledge

Presentation made at GECON 2021- 18th International Conference on the Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems and Services, following the submission of the paper:

A new blockchain ecosystem for trusted, traceable & transparent ontological knowledge.

👉 Paper Authors: Thanasis Papaioannou, Vlado Stankovski, Petar Kochovski, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne, Caroline Barelle, Alberto Ciaramella, Marco Ciaramella and George Stamoulis.

Transcript

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   A NEW BLOCKCHAIN ECOSYSTEM FOR
   TRUSTED,TRACEABLE AND TRANSPARENT
   ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
   Thanasis G. Papaioannou1, Vlado Stankovski2, Petar Kochovski2, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne3, Caroline Barelle4, Alberto
   Ciaramella5, Marco Ciaramella5, and George D. Stamoulis1
   1Athens University of Economics & Business (AUEB), Greece, e-mail: {pathan,gstamoul}@aueb.gr
   2University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, e-mail: {Vlado.Stankovski,Petar.Kochovski}@fri.uni-lj.si
   3iExec, France, e-mail: asb@iex.ec
   4European Dynamics, Luxembourg, e-mail: caroline.barelle@eurodyn.com
   5IntelliSemantic, Rivoli, Italy, e-mail: {ceo, marco.ciaramella}@intellisemantic.com
   09/21/2021
   GECON’ 21, Rome, Italy
   

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2. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
   OUTLINE
   2
   • Introduction
   • The Problem
   • Our Objectives
   • Related Work
   • The Framework Design
   • The Architecture
   • Use Cases
   • Current Implementation Status
   • Conclusions – Future Work
   

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3. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
   3
   INTRODUCTION
   3
   

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4. 4
   TODAY’S INTERNET
   CHALLENGES
   The success of the
   Internet lied in
   • free speech
   • open innovation
   • interoperability
   However, growing concerns that openness,
   trustworthiness, privacy and security are being
   threatened by the quest for high performance and profit
   Multiple threats have been identified when people
   interact with online services:
   • unknown provenance of information
   • anonymity in favor of criminal activity
   • personal privacy violations and personal data exploitation
   • biases in AI algorithms
   • no fair rewards for quality contributions
   • spread of fake news
   • centralization of power
   Existing problems of misuse of information can soon
   achieve even more dangerous levels
   

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5. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
   OUR OBJECTIVE
   5
   The Internet of the future should be more resilient, trustworthy and
   sustainable
   New software technologies stack should be developed
   • at the meeting point between the Semantic Web and
   Blockchain
   • to enable trustworthy data / services exchange as well as
   trustworthy content handling for different domains e.g. e-
   Education, e-Health, e-Government, e-Commerce, e-Tourism, e-
   Infrastructures, Industry 4.0 entertainment
   

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6. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
   ONTOCHAIN 7 CORE PARTNERS
   

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7. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
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   ONTOCHAIN
   Up to 4.2 Millions € funding and mentoring program with best international
   experts in Semantic Web, Linked Data, ontology engineering, Blockchain
   interoperability, knowledge management, distributed and decentralised
   computing, business models for trusted knowledge …
   ONTOCHAIN - Trust traceable and transparent ontological knowledge on blockchain
   ✓ EU H2020 project and part of the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI)
   initiative
   ✓ Launched in September 2020
   ✓ 3 Open Calls to develop blockchain-based knowledge management solutions that will
   be part of a novel software ecosystem for a better share of knowledge and value.
   7
   

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8. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
   RELATED WORK
   8
   Several initiatives are aiming to bring the benefits of DLTs to different business domains:
   • GAIA-X: European data infrastructure for developing innovative trustworthy and sustainable data economy, by relying on
   standards and open-source software
   • Hyperledger Fabric (HLF): permissioned blockchain project originally developed by IBM. HLF follows a flexible modular
   design which allows to simply replace components (e.g. consensus, smart contract language) and adapt to various
   application domains
   • fast transaction throughput, limited scalability to a maximum of 16 peers, vulnerability to compromised nodes
   • EOSIO: a modular framework for creating industrial-scale permissioned or permission-less blockchains and implements a
   2-layer consensus protocol which combines a Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol and a delegated Proof-of-Stake
   protocol
   • High throughput
   • ONTology: high performance PoS public blockchain (Chinese initiative) that focuses on decentralized identity and
   trustworthy data exchange
   None of the above combines the functionality intended to be delivered by ONTOCHAIN
   

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   ONTOCHAIN FRAMEWORK
   9
   

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    THE
    ONTOCHAIN
    ARCHITECTURE
    

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    USE-CASES
    LAYER
    • Trustworthy Information/Services Exchange:
    Encapsulates the tools and libraries for secure exchange
    of trustworthy data/services among trustworthy parties,
    namely
    • data provenance mechanisms,
    • decentralized oracles for assessing data trustworthiness,
    • decentralized reputation models to assess the
    trustworthiness of data sources and service providers,
    • secure data exchange mechanisms to transfer the data
    securely among transacted parties through cryptographic
    mechanisms
    • Trustworthy and Transactional Content Handling:
    Enables trustworthy data handling by means of
    • authorized access/handling of the data,
    • data credibility assessment,
    • copyrights management,
    • secure and privacy aware querying of the data
    

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    12
    APPLICATION
    PROTOCOLS
    LAYER (I)
    • Data Provenance: Storage and retrieval of complete trail
    of transactions that resulted in a record of processing
    activity
    • Reputation Models: Build different decentralized
    reputation models over the blockchain, so that reputation
    feedback is genuine, credible and anonymous
    • Decentralized Oracles: Assess trustworthiness of real-
    world data (numerical, categorical, textual, time-series,
    etc.) to be deployed by Smart Contracts
    • Market Mechanisms ``as a Service”: Support
    data/service transactions, trading of physical assets, price
    determination, billing, customer support, inventory
    management services, DeFi , value sharing and more
    

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13. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    13
    APPLICATION
    PROTOCOLS
    LAYER (II)
    • Secure Data Exchange: Exchange securely data among
    distributed parties, while verifying data ownership, access
    rights, authenticity of transacted parties, data integrity and
    confidentiality
    • Ontology Representation: New ontologies for smart
    contracts and decentralized services to enable service
    searchability and matching with service requests, semantic
    agreements based blockchain-based consensus, tools and
    methods that can help deduce new knowledge arriving from
    IoT
    • Multi-source Identity Verification: Register and verify
    individual digital identities of physical objects
    • Value Sharing and Incentives: Proper incentive mechanisms
    for rewarding the people involved, according to their
    contribution
    

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14. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    14
    CORE
    PROTOCOLS
    LAYER (I)
    • Certification: Confirmation of certain
    characteristics/credentials of an object, person, or
    organization, e.g., a government may issue certificates to
    cloud providers for GDPR-compliant handling of private
    citizens’ data
    • Secure/Privacy Aware Storage: Off-chain distributed
    storage, encryption mechanisms and access control, as well
    as various partitioning, fragmentation and redundancy
    methods (e.g., StorJ)
    • Identity Management: Ability to issue/recover self-sovereign
    identities, to identify oneself in specific interactions (e.g.,
    withdrawing money in a bank), and to preserve one’s privacy
    (e.g., healthcare data, online buyer’s habits)
    

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15. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
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    CORE
    PROTOCOLS
    LAYER (II)
    • Gateways/Bridges: Connect the functionality of
    ONTOCHAIN blockchain with the outside world, including
    other blockchains in the form of Smart Contracts, as well as
    several higher-level wrappers for commonly used
    languages (e.g., JavaScript, Java and Python)
    • Data Semantics: Supporting W3C semantic web
    standards in the blockchain and providing data semantic
    annotation, semantics extraction, linking, inference,
    alignment and reasoning on top of blockchains
    • Authorisation: Access to specific portions of data
    according to SSI/credentials and Role-Based Access
    Control (RBAC). E.g., a patient is self-identified on
    blockchain, while a medical doctor gains access to the
    medical records based on her/his role (e.g., surgeon,
    general practitioner)
    

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    USE CASES – VERTICALS
    16
    • Arts - Remunerate artistic work
    • Commerce and Trading – P2P eCommerce, Proprietary data trading
    • Education - Credible and authentic eScience
    • Finance - Decentralized borrowing and lending
    • Healthcare – Access to patient data, Drug control, Privacy-aware data-
    analytics
    • Industry - Privacy-aware data analytics
    • Insurance - Decentralized, Transparent and Trustworthy Insurance
    • Manufacturing – Supply Chain Management, Maintenance tracking
    • Public Sector – Smart cities Traffic control
    

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17. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    17
    P2P
    COMMERCE
    DAPP
    SCENARIO
    

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18. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
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    CURRENT STATUS
    18
    

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    ONTOCHAIN FRAMEWORK IMPLEMENTATION
    19
    

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20. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
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    THE 7 PROJECTS CURRENTLY IN THE ONTOCHAIN
    FRAMEWORK
    20
    Project Main Results Feature supported Other to mention
    OntoSsiVault Horizontal SDK SSI, Verifiable Credentials Store and manage
    credentials
    HIBI Horizontal SDK SSI, eIDAS linkage
    CopyrightLY Vertical microservices Claim authorship, Dispute
    claims
    Incentives for non-false
    claims, filing complaints
    KnowledgeX Vertical microservices and
    Horizontal SDK
    Privacy-aware data analytics Also request/offer
    matchmaching
    REPUTABLE Vertical microservices Reputation management Feedback Unlinkability, Rater
    Verifiability, Data Integrity
    GraphChain Horizontal SDK Blockchain semantic data store Uitilization of semantics in
    blockchain smart contracts
    POC4Commerce Ontologies E- commerce ontologies for
    any services/goods offered in
    blockchain
    Tokens and exchange
    mechanism
    

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    21
    CONCLUSIONS – FUTURE WORK
    21
    

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22. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    CONCLUSIONS
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    • We presented an overview of the challenges of todays Internet, and how ONTOCHAIN
    platform by combining ontological knowledge and blockchain technology plans to
    tackle them
    • We described the high-level architecture and the main functionality of our innovative
    blockchain ecosystem
    • Moreover, with one use case scenario, we exemplified how the proposed platform
    could enable innovative and promising distributed applications
    • We presented a quick overview of the current status of the platform
    • As a future work, we plan to define the ONTOCHAIN architecture in more depth with
    detailed APIs among the different components and implementation details.
    Additionally, we will demonstrate prototype implementations of exemplary distributed
    applications enabled by the proposed platform
    

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23. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    Open Call 2 specific objective is to implement an infrastructure that will host ONTOCHAIN’s trustworthy data,
    metadata and services, as well as specific software solutions that can be used widely, further extending the
    use cases and the architectural features planned by the end of the Open Call 1.
    Topic 1: Decentralized Oracles for ONTOCHAIN
    Topic 2: Market Mechanisms for ONTOCHAIN
    Topic 3: ONTOCHAIN Interoperability & API Gateways
    Topic 4: ONTOCHAIN Network Design and Scalability
    Topic 5: Semantic Based Marketplaces for ONTOCHAIN
    Topic 6: Data Provenance in ONTOCHAIN
    23
    OPEN ISSUES – FUTURE WORK
    

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24. STAY UPDATED
    AND GET INVOLVED!
    /company/ontochain
    ontochain.ngi.eu
    @ONTOCHAIN
    @ONTOCHAIN
    f6s.com/ontochainproject
    /channel/UCcF7Ovd99lOKcjMGQdnhIvA
    Thank you!
    e-mail: pathan@aueb.gr
    

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25. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
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    SUPPORT SLIDES
    25
    

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26. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    ONTOCHAIN VISION: TRUSTWORTHY DATA
    EXCHANGE EXAMPLE
    26
    

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    ONTOSSIVAULT / GIMLY ID SDK
    STORE & MANAGE
    VERIFIABLE CREDENTIALS
    GRANULAR CONTROL
    OVER YOUR DATA
    PASSWORDLESS
    LOGIN
    SELF SOVEREIGN IDENTITY
    (SSI) AND THE SSI STACK
    

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28. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    

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    COPYRIGHTLY: IPR MANAGEMENT FOR DATA / CONTENT
    • Authorship and rights management
    layer for ONTOCHAIN
    • Fundamental services:
    • Claim authorship (of content or data)
    • Token curated claims and complaints
    • Reuse terms and conditions
    • Foundation for future vertical applications on the
    ONTOCHAIN ecosystem
    https://www.linumlabs.com/articles/bonding-curves-the-what-why-and-shapes-behind-it
    

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    KnowledgeX: Privacy-aware data analytics
    ● KX is a Marketplace where data
    scientists can find gigs offered by data
    owners. They can execute their data
    science tasks in a trusted environment
    where the data owner has full control
    over the data
    ● Offers Microservices
    ○ Matchmaking
    ○ User Management
    ○ Gig Management
    ● Offers Interfaces:
    ○ To iExec to create jobs
    ○ To blockchain smart contracts
    

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31. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    REPUTABLE - Privacy-Friendly Reputation System
    for Blockchain
    31
    o To develop a decentralized, reliable and verifiable reputation system (REPUTABLE) that can achieve
    trustworthy reputation modelling of external services within a blockchain ecosystem (ONTOCHAIN).
    o Key outcomes:
    o Anonymity of feedback by de-linking user identity
    o Develop an aggregate reputation score for a service provider based on user feedback
    o Capture and maintain provenance of the reputation scores
    o Store reputation data (agg. score & raw feedback)
    • Aggregate score stored on-chain (integrity checking, verifiability)
    • Raw feedback stored off-chain (linked with on-chain reputation scores)
    • Query interface to enable user verification, analytics and interoperability with other services
    

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32. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
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    GRAPHCHAIN: BLOCKCHAIN SEMANTIC DATA STORE
    Graphchain node: L2 sidechain node and a Semantic Data Store
    

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33. | ONTOCHAIN.NGI.EU
    POC4COMMERCE: ONTOLOGY HIERARCHY FOR
    BLOCHAIN E-COMMERCE
    33
    ● A stack of ontologies (OC-Found, OC-
    Commerce, OC-Ethereum) for
    ○ participants, offers, products, services, and
    related supply chains
    ○ tokens and exchange mechanisms
    ○ Ethereum smart contracts, in particular, for
    token trading
    ○ general purpose Ethereum-oriented digital
    commerce
    ● A semantic search engine for enabling
    users to probe the marketplace for the
    desired good and automatically access the
    desired product/service
    

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