Today the awardees of EU funding were announced for the Ontochain blockchain framework. As part of the EU’s ‘Next Generation Internet’ (NGI), Ontochain aims to develop a technical framework for secure, transparent and interoperable knowledge management using blockchain. For each project the funding amounts to €123,000 equity free for seven months, and additional second stage funding for six projects.
There were 137 proposals from 21 countries that were whittled down to 18 by a team of 50 experts. Today 14 are being announced, with another four still to be confirmed.
Below are excerpts from the announcement
ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1 was open for a period of two months, looking for proposals to design the ONTOCHAIN architecture around six main topics. The projects selected to this first cohort are:
Topic 1 – Applications
- LCDP-ONT-APP (Italy and The Netherlands) – A Low Code Development Platform (LCDP) for ONTOCHAIN applications
- CopyrightLY (Spain) – Decentralised Copyright Management for Social Media
Topic 2 – Semantic interoperability
- ISLAND (Cyprus and Greece) – Interlinked SemanticaLly-enriched BlockchAiN Data
- OntoROPA (Spain) – Ontology based ecosystem for Records of Processing Activities
- TENACIOUS (Italy) – Trustworthy sEmaNtic Aware marketplaCe for Interoperable clOUd Services
Topic 3 – On-chain data management
- GraphChain (Poland) – a framework for on-chain data management for ONTOCHAIN
- SEIP (Italy) – Service for Encrypted Information Provider
- UniProDaPI (France) – Universal Proven Data and Process Interchange
Topic 4 – Off-chain knowledge management
- DART (Italy) – A Distributed-OrAcles Framework for PRivacy-Preserving Data Traceability
- KX – KnowledgeX (Germany) – Trusted data-driven knowledge extraction
Topic 5 – Ecosystem economy
- DW-marking (Spain and Greece) – Data Watermarking: The missing link to on-/off-chain implementation of distributed data marketplaces
Topic 6 – Ecosystem scalability and integration
- KUMO (Spain) – A Network Crawler for Ethereum2.0
- HIBI (Germany) – Human Identity Blockchain Initiative: Trustworthy, Formalized, Privacy Preserving
- Solid-Verif (Belgium) – Verifiable Credentials and Solid
Four other selected projects are potentially joining the programme very soon after finalizing the respective administrative procedures.
About Ontochain
ONTOCHAIN marries the Semantic Web with Blockchain to deliver a novel software ecosystem for trusted, traceable, and transparent ontological knowledge management. ONTOCHAIN, which is developed under the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative, explores and delivers novel interoperable on-chain and off-chain data, ontology, knowledge and information management methods.
The ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem consists of a novel protocol/Interfaces suite grouped into high-level application protocols, such as data provenance, reputation models, decentralised oracles, market mechanisms, ontology representation and management, privacy aware and secure data exchange, multi-source identity verification, value sharing and incentives and similar, and core protocols that include smart contracts, authorisation, certification, event gateways, identity management and identification, secure and privacy aware decentralised storage, data semantics and semantic linking, ONTOCHAIN optimisation and similar.
The ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem will demonstrate its potential in high impact domains, such as eHealth, eGovernment, eEducation, eCommerce, decentralised infrastructures and similar in order to achieve trustworthy information exchange and trustworthy and transactional content handling.
The project is operated by 7 partners with complementary expertise that form the core of a vibrant ecosystem: European Dynamics (Luxembourg), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), IntelliSemantic (Italy), iExec Blockchain Tech (France), Athens University of Economics and Business (Greece), German Hellenic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Greece) and F6S (Ireland).
