A Semantic Overlay on Blockchain for Supporting Traceability in Cross-border Logistics

Abstract

Traceability is important for maintaining quality of logistics transactions and improving logistics efficiency. Implementing traceability for cross-border logistics is facing challenges when it lacks global centralized logistics information management services. Blockchain techniques enable a decentralized cross-border logistics management by publishing logistics transaction on blockchain transactions to support privacy protection and traceability. Logistics transactions involves complex interactions among participants. How to publish those interactions on a blockchain platform is a challenge. We propose a semantic overlay model that publishes a logistics transaction as a semantic link on a blockchain platform for supporting traceability. A semantic link schema model is designed and published on the blockchain platform to validate semantics links for ensuring the correctness of logistics transaction execution. The proposed semantic overlay on blockchain supports further extension of semantic computing in decentralized applications.