Toward an ontology‐driven blockchain design for supply‐chain provenance

• Author: Henry M. Kim,Marek Laskowski
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/isaf.1424
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Toward an ontology‐driven blockchain design for supply‐chain

provenance

Henry M. Kim

1

|Marek Laskowski

2

1

Schulich School of Business, York University,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

2

York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Correspondence

Henry M. Kim, Schulich School of Business,

York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Email: hmkim@yorku.ca

Summary

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 pharmaceuti-

cal or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods) has often not been possible with today's items

that are produced and transported in complex, interorganizational, often internationally spanning

supply chains. Recent adoptions of the Internet of Things and blockchain technologies give

promise at better supply‐chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain, as

many favored 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 con-

tribute 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.

KEYWORDS

blockchain, distributed ledger, enterprise modeling, Ethereum, ontology, provenance, smart

contracts, supply‐chain provenance,traceability

1|INTRODUCTION

An interesting practical and theoretical problem in our age of Big Data

is that of determining source of information. One community of

researchers interested in addressing this problem is the ontological

engineering community, who are actively researching the development

of ontologies for knowledge provenance (Erickson, Sheehan, Bennett,

& McGuinness, 2016; Fox & Huang, 2005).

According to Merriam‐Webster (2016), provenance is “source or

origin; or, the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art

or literature.”The ontological engineering community's efforts at for-

mally representing and reasoning about the provenance of knowledge

on the World Wide Web can be considered tractable because data

required to ascertain provenance is in digital form—as data, metadata,

and timestamps, for example. Moreover, semantic Web technologies

facilitate the semantic and workflow modeling and inference required

for Web knowledge provenance. Arguably, provenance evaluation of

artifacts that do not have such a ready and openly accessible digital

footprint or facilitating technologies has not been as tractable a prob-

lem to address. Tracking the ingredients of a pharmaceutical ordemon-

strating authenticity of a luxury handbag are some examples. Whereas

it is true that UPS can accurately track its packages, such granular

provenance evaluation has often not been possible with today's items

that are produced and transported in complex, interorganizational,

often internationally spanning supply chains.

As of late, however, new technologies, namely the Internet of

Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies, promise to offer provenance

even in complex supply chains (Armstrong, 2016). Internet‐aware sen-

sors capture finely granular real‐time data about product and environ-

ment characteristics as well as location and timestamps throughout the

supply chain. So, lack of a digital footprint may no longer be an issue.

Furthermore, distributed, shared databases using blockchain technolo-

gies promise to offer highly secure and immutable access to supply

chain data. Blockchain databases are decentralized, so that provenance

can be evaluated even when no one party can claim ownership over all

supply‐chain data. Inasmuch as metadata and semantic Web technolo-

gies enabled ontologies to be applied for knowledge provenance, it is a

key premise of our research that IoT and the blockchain, in particular,

now can enable ontologies to be used for much improved supply‐chain

provenance. Armed with this premise, this paper details our efforts

toward developing an ontology‐based blockchain for supply‐chain

provenance.

DOI: 10.1002/isaf.1424

18 Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Intell Sys Acc Fin Mgmt. 2018;25:18–27.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/isaf