ONTOCHAIN OPEN CALL RESULTS FOR BLOCKCHAIN BASED PROPOSALS
Meet the innovators selected to co-develop a new software ecosystem for trusted, traceable and transparent ontological knowledge.
The exchange of false information on the Internet has become a worldwide concern, with impact on the political, economic and social well-being. The EU-funded project ONTOCHAIN aims to contribute to solving this issue, through the development of a software ecosystem where information can be managed with greater transparency and confidence.
From the 15th of July to the 15th of September 2021 ONTOCHAIN looked for the best internet innovators in Europe to co-develop this software ecosystem, by launching an open call for blockchain-based proposals around six fundamental pillars of the ONTOCHAIN architecture:
- Decentralized oracles for ONTOCHAIN
- Market mechanisms for ONTOCHAIN
- ONTOCHAIN interoperability & API Gateways
- ONTOCHAIN Network Design and scalability
- Semantic based marketplaces for ONTOCHAIN
- Data Provenance in ONTOCHAIN
“ONTOCHAIN’s journey continues successfully! After a couple of months working hard on the design specifications, the ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1 innovators have passed the baton to the ONTOCHAIN Open Call 2 applicants, to propose their solutions to further extend the architectural features and use cases planned by the end of the Open Call 1.
“All applicants were highly inspired, raising high the level of the competition! Brilliant solutions will now complement the layers of the ONTOCHAIN Ecosystem blueprint architecture not considered in Open Call 1. The second stage of ONTOCHAIN is now launched with once again high expectation!”, said Caroline Barelle, ONTOCHAIN Coordinator.
AND THE SELECTED PROJECTS ARE…
A total of 76 proposals from all over Europe have been submitted to this second ONTOCHAIN open call. A group of 42 experts collaborated as external evaluators with the ONTOCHAIN consortium and the process culminated in the selection of the following projects:
- ADOS (Spain): AirChain Decentralized Oracle System
- BOWLER (Italy and Netherlands): Blockchain-Oriented Warehouse & Low-Code Engine and Reasoner
- CARECHAIN (Spain): Supporting CARE through microinsurances using blockCHAIN
- DESMO-LD (Italy): Decentralized Smart Oracles for Trusted Linked Data
- DKG (Slovenia and Serbia): Decentralised and Scalable Knowledge Graph Economy Tools Supporting the “Trusted, traceable and transparent ontological knowledge on blockchain — ONTOCHAIN”
- Geontology (Spain): A geo-aware network protocol for enabling trustable cross-border operations and data exchange in a global digital economy
- MFSSIA (Estonia): Multi-Factor Self-Sovereign Identity Authentication
- NFTWatch (France): An RDF based ontology to describe exhaustively what NFT are, as well as a set of IT tools to interact with it
- ONTOSPACE (Poland): A stable, scalable, efficient and cost-effective network for ONTOCHAIN
- PiSwap (Germany): Price-Building-Mechanism for asymmetric NFT-markets
- PRINGO (Spain): Private Incentives for Common Goods
- PS-SDA (Sweden): Provenance services with Smart Data Agreements
- Perun-X (Germany): Efficient Cross-Chain Infrastructure for ONTOCHAIN
WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE SELECTED TEAMS?
During the next five to ten months, the selected teams will be building a prototype for one of the six pillars of the ONTOCHAIN architecture. This will allow the delivery of ONTOCHAIN’s Protocol Suite and Software Ecosystem Foundations.
To support this innovative work, each team will get up to €145k (equity-free). Experts in diverse fields will also provide to the selected innovators technology development guidance, as well as access to top infrastructure, training in business and data related topics, coaching, visibility and community building support.
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 seven 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).