Blockchain as a Platform for Collaborative Ontology Evolution

The Semantic Web is an incomplete dream so far, but a revolutionary platform as Blockchain could be the solution to this, not optimal reality. There is still little understanding of, and support for, the evolutionary aspects of ontologies. This is particularly crucial in distributed and collaborative settings such as the Semantic Web, where ontologies naturally co-evolve with their communities of use. In this setting, different organizations and teams collaboratively build a common ground of the domain. In this "complex" and dynamic setting, a collaborative change process model requires more powerful engineering, argumentation and negotiation methodologies. Blockchain offers a robust framework for teams' collaboration and ontology versioning globally between an infinite number of teams. Blockchain is an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. This makes blockchains potentially suitable for the recording of evolution events, ontology records, and other records management activities, such as ontology evolution, transaction processing and ontology documenting provenance. In this paper, after briefly summarizing the significant features of Blockchain, we describe blockchain-empowered solutions for building an evolution model based on blockchain technology and its artifacts.