Towards an Ontology-Driven Blockchain Design for Supply Chain Provenance
This addresses the challenge of granular provenance tracking for physical goods like pharmaceuticals and luxury items in inter-organizational supply chains, representing an incremental advancement by combining existing technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of tracking provenance in complex supply chains by proposing an ontology-driven blockchain design, demonstrating the translation of a traceability ontology into smart contracts on Ethereum to execute provenance traces and enforce constraints.
An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods--e.g. tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods--has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, inter-organizational, often internationally-spanning supply chains. Recent adoption of Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies give promise at better supply chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain as many favoured use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.