CSR:SmartChainDB - Enabling Smart Marketplaces With A Scalable Semantically-Enhanced Blockchain Platform

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Production of goods and services is becoming increasingly distributed and decentralized, with organizations often requiring partnerships with other organizations to achieve their goals. However, in some domains such as digital manufacturing, stakes can be very high (e.g. aircraft manufacturing). Consequently, rapid and organic formation of partnerships is often not possible because the process of establishing trust between partners is laborious, time-consuming and expensive - the so-called "trust tax". In this environment, overcoming the trust-tax barrier is a significant impediment to market participation for newer or smaller organizations. The SmartChainDB project will investigate the foundations and implementation of middleware for achieving the vision of "smart digital marketplaces" where partnerships between service organizations are brokered digitally rather than with physical interactions. It aligns with the NSF Harnessing Data for 21st Century Science and Engineering Big Ideas vision and can serve to improve US competitiveness in advanced manufacturing. The vision is to build on the general properties of the present-day technology of trust (blockchains) and develop necessary extensions for enabling (i) declarative descriptions of both service provider capabilities and service requestor needs; (ii) a data-driven trust model based on data and metadata about organizations, their assets, capabilities and performance records; (iii) automatic matching and trust-based validation of service providers' bids to requests for service; and (iv) confidentiality and privacy of sensitive parts of partner transactions and collaborations. Key design challenges will be supporting these goals while achieving scalability, performance, and quality. The SmartChainDB project will deepen our insights in the area of software systems for digital trust. It will provide inter-disciplinary training opportunities for the next-generation of computer scientists and industrial systems engineers. It also has the potential to broaden market participation in various industries by significantly reducing the trust-tax burden, ensuring a more level playing field for smaller and startup organizations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.