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An Architecture for Attesting to the Provenance of Ontologies Using Blockchain Technologies

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Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 453))

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Abstract

When applying ontologies in practice, human and machine agents need to ensure that their provenance is trustworthy and it can be relied upon the contained concepts. This is particularly crucial for sensitive tasks such as in medical diagnostics or for safety-criticial applications. In this paper, we propose an architecture for the decentralized attestation and verification of the integrity and validity of ontologies using blockchain technologies. Blockchains are an immutable, tamper-resistant and decentralized storage where all transactions are digitally signed. Thus, they permit tracing the provenance of concepts and identify responsible actors. For a proof-of-concept we extended the WebProtégé editor so that domain experts can attest to the provenance of ontologies via their Ethereum blockchain account, subsequently permitting other actors to reason about the validity and integrity of ontologies. For evaluating the applicability of this approach, we explore a use case in the biomedical domain and perform a cost analysis for the public Ethereum blockchain. It is shown that the attestation procedure is technically feasible and offers a new strategy for placing trust in ontologies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Validators are sometimes also called miners.

  2. 2.

    The visitor implementation is found here: http://owlcs.github.io/owlapi/apidocs_4/org/semanticweb/owlapi/util/HashCode.html.

  3. 3.

    A crypto wallet & gateway to blockchain apps - https://metamask.io/.

  4. 4.

    Filtering by size on BioPortal orders ontologies by number of classes.

  5. 5.

    London Upgrade – https://ethereum.org/en/history/#london.

  6. 6.

    Etherscan – https://etherscan.io.

  7. 7.

    See https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/.

  8. 8.

    Avalanche - https://www.avax.network/.

  9. 9.

    Bloxberg infrastructure - https://bloxberg.org/.

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Acknowledgments

The research on this paper has been partially financed by the Swiss National Science Fund grant number 196889.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Digitalization and Information Systems Group, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Simon Curty & Hans-Georg Fill

  2. Center for Computational Biomedicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

    Rafael S. Gonçalves

  3. Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

    Mark A. Musen

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  1. Simon Curty
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  1. Faculty of Information Sciences, University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Boris Shishkov

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Curty, S., Fill, HG., Gonçalves, R.S., Musen, M.A. (2022). An Architecture for Attesting to the Provenance of Ontologies Using Blockchain Technologies. In: Shishkov, B. (eds) Business Modeling and Software Design. BMSD 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 453. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11510-3_11

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