Block Chain Technologies & The Semantic Web: A Framework for Symbiotic Development

The concept of peer-to-peer applications is not new, nor is the concept of distributed hash tables. What emerged in 2008 with the publication of the Bitcoin white paper was an incentive structure that unified these two software paradigms with a set of economic stimuli to motivate the creation of a dedicated computing network orders of magnitude more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputers. The purpose of which is the maintenance of a massive distributed database known as the Bitcoin “block chain”. Apart from the digital currency it enables, block chain technology is a fascinating new computing paradigm with broad implications for the future development of the World Wide Web, and by extension, the further growth of Linked Data and the Semantic Web. This work is divided into two main sections, we first demonstrate how block chain technologies can contribute toward the realization of a more robust Semantic Web, and subsequently we provide a framework wherein the Semantic Web is utilized to ameliorate block chain technology itself.