An effective and elastic blockchain-based provenance preserving solution for the open data

Abstract

Purpose In the open data context, the shared data could come through many transformation processes, originating from many sources, which exposes the risk of non-authentic data. Moreover, each data set has different properties, shared under various licenses, which means the updated data could change its characteristics and related policies. This paper aims to introduce an effective and elastic solution to keep track of data changes and manage their characteristics within the open data platform. These changes have to be immutable to avoid violated modification and could be used as the certified provenance to improve the quality of data. Design/methodology/approach This paper will propose a pragmatic solution that focuses on the combination of comprehensive knowledge archive network – the broadest used open data platform and hyperledger fabric blockchain to ensure all the changes are immutable and transparent. As using smart contracts plus a standard provenance data format, all processes are running automatically and could be extended to integrate with other provenance systems and so the introduced solution is quite flexible to be used in different open data ecosystems and real-world application domains. Findings The research involves some related studies about the provenance system. This study finds out that most of the studies are focused on the commercial sector or applicable to a specific domain and not relevant for the open-data section. To show that the proposed solution is a logical and feasible direction, this paper conducts an experimental sample to validate the result. The testing model is running successfully with an elastic system architect and promising overall performance. Originality/value Open data is the future of many businesses but still does not receive enough attention from the research community. The paper contributes a novel approach to protect the provenance of open data.