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Ontology has released its Ecosystem White Paper, the third in a series of five documents providing a thorough outlook on the public platform. The paper covers Ontology’s ecosystem in regard to the underlying technology, governance, and applications.

Another key matter the paper addresses is that of “Ontology Common” and “Ontology Custom”. To put it simply, “Ontology Common” refers to the set of modules and protocols that are readily available to all participants in the ecosystem, including the identity management and data exchange modules. “Ontology Custom” describes Ontology’s customizable protocol and module design. The loose coupling design means different industries can easily customize how their applications interact with Ontology’s public blockchain and more.

This is crucial as it means Ontology is ready for adoption by governments, financial institutions, and other entities which may have compliance or compatibility worries with blockchain technology. Ontology’s design also means partners need not to worry about losing control of data storage; Ontology can index the location of data on their own centralized systems.

Ontology’s technology ecosystem has two major partners, the core team and technical partners. The environment in which the two parties will coexist is free and open in nature, which is reflected in the fact that Ontology will gradually become open-sourced based on international standards, staying true to the principles of distributed systems.

The two parties will interact in the ecosystem through technical exchange and collaboration. For higher level exchange this may include sharing ideas on research and development direction, as well as updating technical standards (for example that of the core ledger, smart contract system, security systems, protocols, modules, APIs, and SDKs). Individuals will also be able to collaborate by contributing, auditing, or testing code, all with appropriate incentives/rewards.

The governance ecosystem comprises of verification service providers, application service providers, communities, and individuals. The Ontology Council, whose organization will be looked at in greater detail in the upcoming Governance White Paper, oversees the technology of the underlying infrastructure (including addressing errors and security issues with system updates). Other applications on the platform will govern autonomously, each having their own governance model.

The application ecosystem will bridge the platform with the world. It follows the principles of flexibility, viability, and innovation — making Ontology a public platform on which projects of all shapes and sizes from all industries, regions, and technical backgrounds can operate and flourish.

The Ontology Team has already developed several core modules covered in the paper, including the data marketplace, data transaction, cryptography and security, user authorization, verifiable claim, and distributed database (GlobalDB). If you are interested in the core modules you can read more about them in the Technology White Paper.

The next in the series of Ontology white papers will be the Governance White Paper, which will be released later this quarter. Also this quarter will be the release of Ontology TestNet, in which we will invite the developer community to give feedback in the lead up to the release of Ontology MainNet in Q2 2018. We will post more information on how exactly developers can get involved soon.

You can read the Ecosystem White Paper here. If you have any questions about the Ecosystem White Paper, join us on Discord and drop us a question in the development channel. You can join our Discord here.

The Ontology Team