ONTOCHAIN is funding 18 projects to build the Next Generation Internet

The 18 teams of internet innovators that will start the research towards a new software ecosystem, enabled by the EU-funded project ONTOCHAIN, are chosen.

They will now have the mission of producing functional and technical specifications for the ONTOCHAIN framework, as a human centric decentralised & trustworthy solution.

A group of 50 experts collaborated as external evaluators with the ONTOCHAIN consortium for selecting the more promising ideas for this initial research. A challenging task considering that the consortium received a total of 137 proposals.

“The ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1 was not only a great success in terms of the number of proposals received, spanning from all over Europe (21 countries), but also and above all in terms of their high quality, all envious to contribute to the Next Generation of Internet, to a more human-centered Internet. 66 proposals were marked above the threshold, from which only 18 could be retained. A careful selection of federate blockchain and semantic innovating idea to ensure that all layers of the ONTOCHAIN Ecosystem blueprint architecture will be considered!” says Caroline Barelle, ONTOCHAIN Coordinator.

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.

What’s next for the selected teams?

ONTOCHAIN will support the selected teams through a 7-months programme, granting the participants up to €123k (equity-free funding), free coaching and free access to top infrastructure.

“We stand ready to interact with the participants, to provide a collaboration infrastructure, management process, and most importantly share our ONTOCHAIN ideas, analytics and designs. Hence, we support all technical aspects of our joint software ecosystem. Most importantly, this includes integration! Our goal is to quickly converge together and agree all essential technology choices, functionalities, protocols and interfaces.” – Vlado Stankovski, ONTOCHAIN Technical Coordinator.

During a 2-months period, the 18 teams will start by conceptualizing a research project for one of the open call topics.

The six best projects will then be selected to a second phase (4 months), to elaborate the concept proposed in phase one and prepare design specifications to be implemented in the Open call 2, dedicated to “Protocol suite and software ecosystem foundations”.

Additionally, the best projects will be awarded for the publication of their outcomes.

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, decentralized 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).