A WebProtégé Plugin for Attesting to the Provenance of Ontologies on the Ethereum Blockchain.

Ontologies are shared, formal conceptualizations of a domain that are consumed by human and machine agents alike. Trust in ontologies is a central issue for their application. For example, machine learning algorithms for medical diagnosis may rely on the correctness of ontologies and could potentially deliver false results. For enhancing trust, we developed a WebProtégé plugin for the decentralized attestation and verification to the integrity and validity of ontologies using the Ethereum blockchain. Blockchains are an immutable, tamper-resistant and decentralized storage where all transactions are digitally signed. Thus, they permit tracing the provenance of concepts and identify responsible actors. For a first experimental evaluation, we evaluated the transaction costs for attesting to the provenance of ontologies.