How does blockchain work and has its usefulness been over or under estimated? John Domingue and Sajida Zouarhi show how blockchain is being implemented in a real-world setting. Blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, has an almost unlimited number of applications beyond finance. From digital identities to kidney transplants, blockchain technology solves the problem of intermediary trust between parties without a central authority.
This event took place on the Monday 24th September 2018
A talk at the University of Bonn Computer Science Colloquium. It covers how distributed ledgers (blockchains) combined with decentralised linked data technologies such as Solid can support the management of personal data avoiding the issues highlighted in the media around for example, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
This event took place on the Wednesday 21st November 2018
The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”
As highlighted by the Web’s inventor and by recent stories around the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica the over centralisation of, often personal, data generates significant problems for ordinary users. A related problem is that ‘data poor’ citizens can suffer through the denial of credit and more. Recently in the UK over 60 citizens were erroneously deported because of a lack of citizenship data.
At the OU we have been working on a semantic blockchain platform, LinkChain, which supports the decentralisation of personal data by through a combination of blockchain and Linked Data technologies. In the presentation I will give an overview of our platform and show some initial uses within the higher education space.
This event took place on the Tuesday 18th September 2018
In this webinar, Alexander Mikroyannidis and Allan Third present the applications of Blockchain in education and the importance of the Semantic Blockchain. They also present their work in the H2020 SlideWiki project, which supports the collaborative authoring of open courseware.
This event took place on the Tuesday 14th August 2018
This in depth tutorial, presented at the 2018 International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS), looks at the possibilities for a decentralised semantic web focusing primarily on the relationship between blockchains and linked data. The first part of the talk is an extensive explanation of what blockchains are and how they are used. This is followed by links to ongoing decentralised linked data research including Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID and Ruben Verborgh's Linked Data Fragments.
This event took place on the Tuesday 17th July 2018
Allan Third @thirda talking about Blockchains, Education and the Semantic Web #SlideWiki in #SemWeb offsite meeting at Wijk aan Zee pic.twitter.com/FsnuVmByZQ
— SlideWiki (@SlideWiki) March 16, 2018
This event took place on the Friday 16th March 2018