Data Reliability and Trustworthiness Through Digital Transmission Contracts

As decision-making is increasingly data-driven, trustworthiness and reliability of the underlying data, e.g., maintained in knowledge graphs or on the Web, are essential requirements for their usability in the industry. However, neither traditional solutions, such as paper-based data curation processes, nor state-of-the-art approaches, such as distributed ledger technologies, adequately scale to the complex requirements and high throughput of continuously evolving industrial data. Motivated by a practical use case with high demands towards data trust-worthiness and reliability, we identify the need for digitally-verifiable data immutability as a still insufficiently addressed dimension of data quality. Based on our discussion of shortcomings in related work, we thus propose ReShare, our novel concept of digital transmission contracts with bilateral signatures, to address this open issue for both RDF knowledge graphs and arbitrary data on the Web. Our quantitative evaluation of ReShare's performance and scalability reveals only moderate computation and communication overhead, indicating significant potential for cost-reductions compared to today's approaches. By cleverly integrating digital transmission contracts with existing Web-based information systems, ReShare provides a promising foundation for data sharing and reuse in Industry 4.0 and beyond, enabling digital accountability through easily-adoptable digitally-verifiable data immutability and non-repudiation.