April 22, 2022 at 9:00 am
Aula Magna (room -1.61 on the SB)
FIIT STU in Bratislava, Ilkovičova 2
Vlado Stankovski:
Semantic Web and Blockchain: Ready to Dance?
(University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Abstract
The Internet is becoming more centralized, more asymmetric in terms of information and power distribution, more biased, less privacy-preserving, less secure, and therefore less trustworthy. The past decade has seen the rise of Blockchain (BC) technologies that contribute to the transparent, traceable, and therefore, trustworthy exchange of digital assets among different actors. However, the full spectrum of BC usage to achieve high-quality data, such as completeness, uniqueness, timeliness, validity, accuracy, consistency, integrity, and therefore, trustworthiness, is currently being explored by a plethora of projects and initiatives. Achieving trustworthy content exchange has been one of the primary objectives of the Semantic Web (SW). Ontologies can be used to express the high-level semantics of data and conceptualize data quality, while SW and BC technologies can be used to realise a verification and certification process for data quality. Examples of mechanisms to achieve this are the Decentralised Identities (DIDs) of the SW or the various BC consensus protocols that help achieve decentralisation and realise democratic principles. Therefore, SW and BC technologies can both be used to achieve trust in the highly decentralized, semantically complex, and dynamic environments needed to build smart applications in the future.
This talk explores the crosscutting domain of SW and BC and identifies the key building blocks necessary if we are to achieve trust in the Next-Generation Internet. The ONTOCHAIN’s Next Generation Internet project (ontochain.ngi.eu) aims at realizing a software ecosystem with a layered architecture to contribute to trustworthy data and knowledge management, and information exchange. The application domains that could benefit from the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem are also investigated.
Keynote presentation (pdf, 7,92 MB)
Vlado Stankovski is a Full Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana. He was awarded his degrees in Software Engineering, M.Sc., and Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana in 1995, 2000 and 2009, respectively. He began his career in 1995 as consultant and later as project manager with the Fujitsu-ICL Corporation in Prague. From 1998–2002 he worked as researcher at the University Medical Centre in Ljubljana. In the period 2003–2019, he was with the Department of Construction Informatics at the University of Ljubljana. From 2020 he lectures at all levels (undergraduate, postgraduate) at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science. Courses include Communications Security and Data Protection and Fog Computing for Smart Services.
Vlado Stankovski’s research interests are in semantic and distributed-computing technologies. He has been engaged in large-scale European Research and Innovation projects since 2003. Successful projects include FP4 – RETRANSPLANT, FP5 – SciX, FP6 – DataMiningGrid, InteliGrid, FP7 – mOSAIC Cloud, H2020 – SWITCH, ENTICE, DECENTER. Vlado Stankovski is currently the scientific and technical coordinator of the 6 M EUR Next Generation Internet project ONTOCHAIN.
