ONTOCHAIN OPEN CALL 2

Deadline: Sep 15, 2021  
CALL EXPIRED

GRANTS UP TO €145K, FREE COACHING AND ACCESS TO TOP INFRASTRUCTURE FOR INTERNET INNOVATORS. 

Participate in the co-development of a new software ecosystem for trusted, traceable, and transparent ontological knowledge management.

Apply before the 15th of September 2021, at 17:00 CEST.

From the current Internet standpoint, the way knowledge is generated, curated, shared and stored raises critical concerns about security, privacy, fair and equal distribution of benefits, potential for abuse and adverse impact on individual rights. Citizens, everywhere, are at risk of being presented with partial or biased information reflecting the viewpoint of their provider.

ONTOCHAIN empowers internet innovators to develop trustworthy blockchain-based knowledge management solutions that will be part of a novel software ecosystem. The concept underlying this ecosystem is a better share of knowledge and value on the internet and that for various domains such as health, economy, mobility, public services, energy and sustainability, news, media, entertainment, Industry 4.0, tourism.

Through this second Open Call, up to 12 projects will implement an infrastructure that will host ONTOCHAIN’s trustworthy data, metadata and services, and specific software solutions that can be used widely, further extending the use cases and the architectural features designed by the teams selected through the first Open Call.

Join ONTOCHAIN by submitting a proposal addressing one of the open call topics.

OPEN CALL TOPICS:

Topic 1 - Decentralised oracles for ONTOCHAIN

Activities may focus on designing and developing new decentralised oracle prototypes that rely on advanced technologies, including, but not limited to the areas of IoT, AI, social networking, mobile technologies in the generation of metadata that can be assessed from the viewpoint of trustworthiness and fed to the ONTOCHAIN’s semantic blockchain infrastructure.  Novel oracle frameworks for ONTOCHAIN, e.g. based on different topologies or incentive strategies are also in scope.

Approaches should address the problems of detecting, preventing and mitigating sybil attacks (e.g., majority attack, mirroring, freeloading, data corruption) and collusion among oracles, estimating probabilities for trustworthiness, and particularly focus on practical design and implementation challenges which are in the context of the ONTOCHAIN services and applications.

Additional focus is on the high Quality of Service and low operational costs of the oracles, while achieving the same or higher levels of trust. The designed oracles should be implementable within the time period of the project, and should be showcased within the initial applications (e.g. marketplace, part tracing, copyrights and similar).  

Other specifications can be found under section 1.3.1 of the Guide for Applicant.

Topic 2 - Market mechanisms for ONTOCHAIN

The challenge perceived is to build an unbiased service/product trading system on top of trustworthy information expressed in Semantic Web formats.

This includes:

• The ability to generate (mint) tokens of various types, i.e., Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Fungible Tokens (FT), Semi-Interchangeable Tokens (SFT).
• Support for building DeFi applications on top of the blockchain, i.e., token/stablecoin trading, interest on deposit accounts, token/stablecoin loans, crypto funds, etc.
• The ability to facilitate the use of various types of tokens throughout the lifecycle of data and services.
• The overall market mechanisms for tokenomics (e.g., token distribution strategies, token sharing for ecosystem sustainability, incentives for nodes etc.)
• Enable stable transaction fees.

Other specifications can be found under section 1.3.2 of the Guide for Applicant.

Topic 3 - ONTOCHAIN interoperability & API Gateways

The challenge is to provide future-proof interoperability by developing a trustworthy, privacy-preserving, secure, transparent, democratic and traceable set of Blockchain APIs based on Semantic Web standards. The APIs must support the exchange of ontologies, of data and metadata, of knowledge and information from different blockchains towards ONTOCHAIN and vice versa.

The proposed solutions must hide the heterogeneity of blockchain protocols which limit application development and can break important properties such as trust, consistency and security of data and services which are all paramount to mass adoption. Information and asset exchanges between chains with different protocols must ensure that semantic information, trust, identities and privacy are preserved while maintaining the highest possible level of security.

 Other specifications can be found under section 1.3.3 of the Guide for Applicant.

Topic 4 - ONTOCHAIN Network Design and scalability

• Definition of stakeholders and their requirements.
• Design of flexible services for the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem.
• Deployment of the selected services and testing.
• Optimization and Scalability of the network.
• Operational costs of the network.

Other specifications can be found under section 1.3.4 of the Guide for Applicant.

Topic 5 - Semantic based marketplaces for ONTOCHAIN

Developing a component that offers services similar to existing virtual marketplaces but for arbitrary goods/services, and ensuring the highest level of trust and fairness. The marketplace logic (including the propagation and the matching of market orders) must thus be as decentralized as possible, while offering high performance and low response time.

The solution should leverage ONTOCHAIN services introduced in Open Call 1 for increasing trust between users (e.g., identity, reputation) and be open to all of the present and future ONTOCHAIN stakeholders. In addition to decentralization, particular care must be given to avoiding any censorship, market manipulation (e.g., by hiding, erasing or forging orders or ontological descriptions) and spam attacks. The semantic matching component must guarantee that every offer has been considered, that the returned service/good is always the most appropriate for the user, and that it satisfies every expressed requirement.

Other specifications can be found under section 1.3.5 of the Guide for Applicant.

Topic 6 - Data provenance in ONTOCHAIN

In data lakes, creating a comprehensive immutable audit record of the data, which can be independently verified to ascertain the authenticity of the data is important. In the context of data trading, data owners can prove the legitimacy of owning data and trade it to others or control the number of legitimate copies of the data.

Finally, in the context of business processes, associating a digital token to each high-value item in the supply chain, when the physical item changes hands in the real world, the corresponding digital token is re-assigned in the blockchain. This ensures that the blockchain tracks the journey of the high valued item in the real world. This allows the buyer on receipt of the item to backtrack and verify the chain back to the origin i.e. all the way to the manufacturer.

 Other specifications can be found under section 1.3.6 of the Guide for Applicant.

Open Topic

You can submit a proposal under a different topic, as long as it serves as a building block of the ONTOCHAIN infrastructure and the overall ONTOCHAIN vision and objectives:

“Develop scalable blockchain, decentralized reputation systems and semantic web technologies, in order to achieve trustworthy content handling and information exchange as well as trustworthy service exchange in the next generation Internet/social networks for vital sectors of the European economy”.

Excluding ONTOCHAIN applications, to which the open call 3 will be specifically devoted to.

More information can be found on the Guide for Applicant.