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As a technology partner for ONTOCHAIN, iExec would like to take the opportunity to introduce the initial projects that were successful for ‘ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1’, and were selected to receive the first funding rewards.
ONTOCHAIN is an EU-funded project that has reserved €4.2 Million euros of grants to develop a new ecosystem for trusted, traceable and transparent ontological knowledge management. With iExec as a technical partner and advisor, ONTOCHAIN will fund innovative projects and applications that could play a role in this ecosystem.
ONTOCHAIN is a 3 year-year long project, split into 3 separate Open Calls:
Learn more about ONTOCHAIN:
European Commission announces ‘OntoChain’ project with iExec as key partner
Over the course of these 3 years, in contributing to the scope of ONTOCHAIN, applicants will be encouraged to use and extend existing software solutions from various ONTOCHAIN technical partners, including those from iExec.
Topic 1: Applications
🇮🇹 🇳🇱 Italy & The Netherlands
LCDP-ONT-APP is a project intended to ease the development of ONTOCHAIN components and applications. It will provide 1. ‘low-code IDE’ for ONTOCHAIN applications/components and 2. Ontologies for modeling ONTOCHAIN applications components. The aim is to provide a formal definition of ONTOCHAIN applications/components and their requirements, making the development of ONTOCHAIN applications/components easier and more accessible, as well as increasing overall interoperability by design.
With more content being published on social media than ever before, focused on very few centralized services, it becomes more and more difficult for individuals to monetize their creations. Creators are constrained to monetizing their work in the corresponding platform or manually negotiating reuse, through emails for example, which doesn’t offer any automation or trust mechanisms. CopyrightLY aims to address this issue.
CopyrightLY is a decentralized application that leverages blockchain and semantic web technologies to facilitate copyright management of social media. Integrated into existing social media platforms, it offers alternative monetization opportunities through authorship also provides potential reusers ways of checking authorship of the content they are willing to reuse and the conditions under which it is available.
Topic 2: Interoperability
Cyprus 🇨🇾 & Greece 🇬🇷
Although blockchains are considered a foundation building block in Web 3.0, they lack software standards that can lead to the emergence of a global, open, interoperable and semantically rich data space. ISLAND aims to create an interlinked and interoperable semantically enriched blockchain data ecosystem.
Island tracks how smart contracts evolve, according to the various events that are triggered or the actions that are executed on the contract’s state, before generating RDF graphs that evolve over time into ‘semantic agreements’ Specifically, semantic agreements will provide the capability of validation, through blockchain-enabled smart contracts that will execute on top of the iExec blockchain network, which will ensure that ontologies, as well as, on-chain and off-chain knowledge is logically consistent, or otherwise provide alerts in cases of data inconsistencies.
Spain 🇪🇸
OntoROPA deals with the provision of ‘Records of Personal Data Processing Activities’ (ROPAs). ROPAs are an important component of privacy compliance, mandatory for many stakeholders, such as Public Administration. OntoROPA will provide a set of tools built on top of the technical infrastructure provided by the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem and standards will provide the support to the end users for these functionalities and the interactions that support trustworthy data flow and sharing.
Italy 🇮🇹
The TENACIOUS project addresses Cloud services composition through semantic technologies, applying blockchain technologies to ensure security and increase trust, with the potential to bring benefit to every domain covered by ONTOCHAIN. TENACIOUS will provide access to a secure and trusted Marketplace where semantically described Cloud Services can be Researched, Discovered, and Composed, according to the specific requirements needed.
@Topic 3: On-chain data management
Poland 🇵🇱
GraphChain, the on-chain data management framework for ONTOCHAIN, addresses the basic technological proposition for the Ontochain project, i.e., the synergy between ontologies and the Blockchain mechanisms. Assuming the synergy between Blockchain and semantic technologies is of high importance for all high-level goals of the project, GrapghChain addresses a foundational technological challenge for Ontochain: storing on-chain data in native semantic formats.
GraphChain features:
Italy 🇮🇹
SEIP aims to deliver a framework to ensure granular data access control and confidentiality of data exchanged both on-chain, and off-chain, in a decentralized and scalable fashion, by exploiting novel asymmetric, encryption mechanisms (Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption — CP-ABE) and credential-based approaches (W3C VCs).
France 🇫🇷
UniProDaPI provides a standardless, flexible, scalable and sharded probative blockchain architecture. The global aim is to produce a universal platform for arbitrary parties to connect to and read or write data proofs according to verifiable specifications and monetize their data within trustless digital processes.
Topic 4: Off-chain knowledge management
Italy 🇮🇹
Dart proposes a scalable distributed oracles system, in which off-chain data passes through a consensus process autonomously handled by the involved oracles. This involves an a correlation model in order to enforce trust between oracles. Based on the proposed model, Dart also proposes a data traceability framework. This provides the end user a reliable system, in which products or data can be traced back to their origin.
Germany 🇩🇪
KnowledgeX proposes a decentralized platform that (a) lets companies find specialized data scientists for their specific use cases in a marketplace, (b) enables traceable and transparent knowledge generation with trusted execution environments and blockchain technologies, and © maintains decentralized reputation storage of data analysis and knowledge generation activities carried out by data scientists. KnowledgeX enables trust-aware knowledge extraction from data without giving away control of it.
Topic 5: Ecosystem economy
Spain 🇪🇸 & Greece 🇬🇷
Data Marketplaces (DMs), in which data sellers make datasets available for purchase by data buyers are emerging fast in the big data market for monetising personal, or aggregate, often anonymized, datasets. Monolithic DMs operating under a single authority, need to place full trust on a single company/organisation.
Fully on-chain approaches can encounter scalability problems when faced with large datasets, such as those traded over DMs. To facilitate trustworthy off-chain handling of datasets in distributed DMs, DW-marking will develop a new breed of digital watermarking techniques for protecting ownership, and establishing accountability, in the off-chain handling of datasets.
DW-marking will develop highly tailored watermarking techniques that will embed on the actual data being traded the identity of their original owner. Having such a watermark in place will work as the root for building other ownership related functionalities.
Topic 6: Ecosystem scalability and integration
Spain 🇪🇸
To increase scalability, multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, are moving towards a sharded blockchain, in which multiple blockchains co-exist and communicate by the means of a master chain. KUMO aims to design and develop a network crawler that can continuously gather information about peers in the network and their behavior. KUMO will be a tool capable of monitoring a designated node, or set of nodes in the Eth2 network, for a long period of time. It will gather data about the behavior of the target nodes in terms of latency, number of connections and disconnections, online time, number of messages forwarded to other peers.
Germany 🇩🇪
The Human Identity Blockchain Initiative (HIBI) will provide the ONTOCHAIN community with cornerstone blockchain technology to realize the ONTOCHAIN vision. HIBI incorporates scalable blockchain, decentralized legal reputation/identity systems and interoperable semantic web technologies. The project aims to formalize human identity on the blockchain in a trustworthy and, privacy-preserving manner. HIBI will leverage the established EU framework for electronic identification and trust services (eIDAS) to accomplish this. HIB will provide the root of trust for a generation of semantic web and EU-based blockchain services by linking eIDAS compliant legal identities (qualified electronic signatures) with blockchain-based key-pairs.
Belgium 🇧🇪
The Solid-Verif project aims to provide a solution (i.e. an architecture, method and technique) to use verifiable credentials in the Solid ecosystem.
We will design the solution by first constructing an architecture and a method, and investigating and selecting a suitable technique. Next, we will create a prototype application for a limited but important scope of the solution to evaluate its feasibility.
By introducing verifiable credentials into the Solid ecosystem, we enable its actors to certify and verify the origin of data so that trust is increased and data can be reused with confidence. The importance of this functionality was also underlined by several of our customers.
Learn more about the ONTOCHAIN initiative and projects selected:
Twitter •Youtube • iExec Roadmap • Technical Documentation •Github
