Student: Lisa-Marie Huber     (2021)

Supervisor: a.Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Wolfram Wöß
Co-Supervisor: DI Lisa Ehrlinger, BSc

Motivation and Challenges

Blockchain technology is widely known for its security aspects to make stored data “tamper-proof”. At our institute, we developed a program called BlocK-DaQ (Blockchain-based Knowledge Graph for Data Quality Measurement), which supports the creation of a domain knowledge graph that integrates multiple heterogeneous data sources within a company environment. BlocK-DaQ facilitates continuous data quality monitoring of those data sources and to trace changes in the local schemas. Thus, we want to evaluate the feasibility of Blockchain to secure the KG in BlocK-DaQ for two reasons:

1. Typically, employees that are only responsible for a specific part of the data (e.g., one local DB within a department), do not always report changes in their data source schema. The blockchain should ensure that local changes in the schemas require a consensus (at least 50 % agreement). Employees can also be additionally motivated to report changes with the reward system.
2. Lineage and tracking of schema evolution (both the local and the global ones) is not always possible in practice. The blockchain ensures that each change is persisted as globally visible new state that cannot be tampered with.

Objective

The aim of this thesis is to investigate existing Blockchain frameworks for their suitability to store domain knowledge in form of a knowledge graph. As proof-of-concept, blockchain characteristics should added to the BlocK-DaQ knowledge graph in order to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages.