Blockchain Technology as an Approach for Data Marketplaces

Abstract

In the digital Economy 'Data is the new oil. In the last decade technology has disrupted every filed imaginable. One such booming technology is Blockchain. A blockchain is essentially a distributed database of records or public ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating parties. And once entered, the information is immutable. Ongoing projects and prior work in the fields of big data, data mining and data science has revealed how relevant data can be used to enhance products and services. There are uncountable applications and advantages of relevant data. The most valuable companies of today treat data as a commodity, which they trade and earn revenues. But use of relevant data has also drawn attention by the other non-conventional organizations and domains. To facilitate such trading, data marketplaces have emerged. In this paper we present a global data marketplace for users to easily buy and share data. The main focus of this research is to have a central data sharing platform for the recycling industry. This paper is a part of the research project "Recycling 4.0" which is focusing on sustainably improving the recycling process through exchange of information. We identify providing secure platform, data integrity and data quality as some major challenges for a data marketplace. In this paper we also explore how global data marketplace could be implemented using blockchain and similar technologies.