Centralisation of data is increasingly widely considered to be an important societal problem. The ability to manage personal data, especially, in accordance with good principles for decentralised data systems is vital in response. We present our vision for the trusted decentralised personal data Web in the form of the LinkChains architecture

Domingue, John

Third, Allan

English

Open Research Online

Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputsLinkChains: Trusted Personal Linked DataConference or Workshop ItemHow to cite:Third, Allan and Domingue, John (2019). LinkChains: Trusted Personal Linked Data. In: Blockchain-enabledSemantic Web, 27 Oct 2019, Auckland, New Zealand, (In Press).For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© [not recorded]Version: Accepted ManuscriptLink(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://www.cs.toronto.edu/ consens/blocksw/papers/paper3.pdfCopyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukLinkChains: Trusted Personal Linked DataAllan Third1[0000 0002 0386 1936] and John Domingue1[0000 0001 8439 0293]?Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK{allan.third,john.domingue}@open.ac.ukAbstract. Centralisation of data is increasingly widely considered to be animportant societal problem. The ability to manage personal data, especially,in accordance with good principles for decentralised data systems is vital inresponse. We present our vision for the trusted decentralised personal dataWeb in the form of the LinkChains architecture.Keywords: Blockchain · Semantic Web · Linked Data · Solid.Centralisation on the Web has been a topic of increasing concern recently, with acorresponding interest in decentralisation. In particular, there are concerns about per-sonal data in large volumes aggregated in the control of a single entity who is not thesubject of the data. Our vision is of a world where individuals are in control of theirown personal semantic data, on decentralised platforms following the FAIR TRADEprinciples [5] – in particular, where the content of such data can be verified and trustedby third parties wherever needed.Centralisation of data can have global e↵ects. The potential influence of CambridgeAnalytica on recent major political events was reported as a major scandal [1], forexample – made possible by the quantities of personal data held and controlled by asingle entity, Facebook. These concerns are not restricted solely to the digital domaineither. The loss of centralised records and distrust of non-centrally-held records led to63 British citizens being deported, and up to 57 000 more being at risk of losing theirUK rights and residency [2], [6].Issues such as these have prompted initiatives such as Solid [4], which aims to o↵erpersonal Linked Data “pods”, allowing users to hold and control their own data. Fromanother direction, the concept of blockchains [7] arose as a distributed ledger ; a sharedappend-only record of immutable securely timestamped entries.In [5], we presented “FAIR TRADE”, an extension of the FAIR principles [8] fordata management to cover approaches to decentralised data. Findable, Accessible,Interoperable, and Reusable are extended with TRusted, Autonomous, Distributed,and dEcentralised. We present LinkChains as a FAIR TRADE platform for personalLinked Data using blockchains to provide a trust backend. LinkChains o↵ers userprivacy and control, and granular data verification. A cryptographic hash of metadatarelating to personal data is stored in an immutable blockchain record, signed by atrusted party. Such a hash serves as a pointer to the metadata location on decentralised? Supported by QualiChain H2020 ICT 822404. Copyright c  2019 of this paper by itsauthors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International(CC BY 4.0).Pre-print2 A. Third and J. Dominguefile storage platforms such as IPFS [3] capable of storing larger volumes of data moreeasily and cheaply than most blockchain platforms. The immutability of the blockchainrecord, and the nature of hashing, ensures the timestamp, immutability, and immunityfrom faking of the IPFS data. An individual’s Solid pod contains their actual data, asLinked Data where possible, with pointers both to the blockchain and IPFS records.Relevant hashes of data and metadata in each location can be collectively used toverify the publication and untampered status of each.LinkChains is thus a fully decentralised platform which supports individual hostingand control of their personal data while maintaining the ability for external parties toverify its contents where needed. Further extension to LinkChains involves the use ofMerkle trees of subsets of the data, as fine-grained as terms or quads. The tree dataensures that queries can return verifiable proofs of data at the given granularity –we refer to this augmented query architecture as MerQL. The strength of the MerQLapproach is with federation; proofs can be included with individual data items includedin results aggregated from federated, sources.[5] shows how LinkChains can support FAIR TRADE data management. In brief,the novel principles (TRADE) are supported since LinkChains data can be Trustedvia the blockchain records and hashing, Autonomous due to individual control of per-sonal data, and Distributed and dEcentralised due to the underlying Solid, distributedstorage, and blockchain technology. LinkChains provides a research environment forexploring Linked Data and blockchains in general, and how notions of trust, identity,and decentralisation interact with each other, as well as enabling the implementationand study of the implications of the vision we opened with: of a world where indi-viduals are in control of their own personal semantic data, on trusted FAIR TRADEdecentralised platforms.References1. The Cambridge Analytica Files: the story so far, https://gu.com/p/8b2tc2. Windrush generation, https://fullfact.org/immigration/windrush-generation/3. Benet, J.: IPFS - Content-addressed, versioned, P2P file system. (2014),http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.35614. Berners-Lee, T.: Solid project website, https://solid.mit.edu/5. Domingue, J., Third, A., Ramachandran, M.: The FAIR TRADE framework for assessingdecentralised data solutions. In: Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide WebConference. pp. 866–882 (2019), http://oro.open.ac.uk/60149/6. Grierson, J.: Windrush row: 63 peole could have been wrongly removed,https://gu.com/p/8j4287. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2009)8. Wilkinson, M.D., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I.J., Appleton, G., Axton, M., Baak, A.,Blomberg, N., Boiten, J.W., da Silva Santos, L.B., Bourne, P.E., et al.: The FAIR GuidingPrinciples for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific data 3 (2016)

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