A New Blockchain Ecosystem for Trusted, Traceable and Transparent Ontological Knowledge Management

The Internet is becoming more centralized, more asymmetric in terms of knowledge and power distribution, more biased, less privacy-preserving and less trustworthy. Blockchain technologies already enable the safe and fair exchange of digital assets in a decentralized manner; however, its application to information exchange remains largely unexplored. This article exposes our vision for a semantically-enriched blockchain software ecosystem named ONTOCHAIN, that enables the development of trustworthy distributed applications that can empower users, guarantee both their privacy and high quality of service, and ultimately support pluralism and democracy. ONTOCHAIN aims primarily to attain trustworthy service exchange and trustworthy content handling by means of advanced knowledge management mechanisms for several domains such as health, economy, public services, energy and sustainability, news, media, entertainment, Industry 4.0 and tourism. We present the main components of the ONTOCHAIN architecture and their functionality. Finally, the validity of our approach is exemplified by describing how decentralized applications can be enabled by the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem.