The ongoing dichotomy of public and permissioned networks in the DLT space with regards to data privacy needs a radically different, connection-first approach. Connecting permissioned and public data in one Decentralized Knowledge Graph is the key new functionality of the latest version of OriginTrail, the first major upgrade to the OriginTrail node client in the Freedom-Gemini stage. It enables new exciting use cases — like data marketplaces, data portability, and automated GDPR compliance — and positions OriginTrail at the forefront of innovation in DLT solutions for supply chains.

Ever since the inception of the OriginTrail project in early 2013, which at that time focused on showcasing food provenance to end consumers, it has been clear that obtaining the necessary information to trace back to the product origin presents a difficult problem. Understanding what has happened with any object of interest involves tracing the history of relevant supply chain events, including those involving the product’s components (i.e. “parts,” usually obtained from different suppliers) and often its aggregations (i.e. tracing a group of products on pallets) across the many stages of a possibly globe-spanning supply chain. To illustrate the effect of such an issue in simple terms, consider that a staggering 70% of 300 respondents to a survey conducted by Resilinc in late January and early February, immediately following the Covid-19 outbreak in China, said they were still in data collection and assessment mode, manually trying to identify which of their suppliers had a site in the specific locked-down regions of China.

The reason behind this surprising statistic is that gathering all the necessary data to obtain such knowledge involves major hurdles. The complexities, among others, include having heterogeneous data structures across IT systems, limited data accessibility, integration complexity due to low system interoperability and lack of mechanisms to ensure the integrity of data and digital processes within the supply chain network, to ensure only relevant and trustworthy information is shared.

Such issues have led to an information landscape of “data silos”, the bridging of which eludes even the largest technology vendors for a very good reason. Tackling this difficult problem of a “fragmented reality” requires taking a radically new, connection-first approach to how we build supply chain data networks. We need to be thinking of, building and engineering systems with an ever-increasing amount of data in mind (“connected data”), systems that can easily communicate with one another and ultimately trust each other (“connected systems”). Such interconnectedness of data and systems will vastly improve organizational and supply chain resilience, which is of crucial importance in times of crisis such as the current global pandemic.

The good news is that we’ve seen similar systems built before. The World Wide Web (WWW) presents a “network of machines” that effectively communicate with one another. The WWW is also a “network of data” thanks to key underlying concepts such as Hypertext. The evolution of the WWW owes its success to a complex stack of open protocols, standards, and infrastructure essentially built on the connection-first principles.

Connecting Systems Can Now Be Done While Escaping Vendor Lock-Ins

The OriginTrail ecosystem has been evolving with a connection-first approach from the very beginning. The launch of the permissionless OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) in 2018 (Vostok stage) has provided the necessary infrastructure, efficiently utilizing a stack of open technologies: the Ethereum blockchain in the consensus layer, decentralized P2P Kademlia overlay network, strong cryptographic primitives, and open data standards to name a few. With iterative development, the system has vastly improved over time, culminating in the major v4 release of the network client in December 2019, which marked the beginning of the Freedom-Gemini development stage and enabled higher data scalability, better system connectivity, and interoperability.

As of today, the ODN spans the globe with participating network nodes distributed across continents, operated by both companies and individuals in a permissionless manner (according to the specifications of the OriginTrail protocol), and facilitating easy connectivity with legacy systems from major vendors such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Being a completely open-source, permissionless network, OriginTrail effectively tackles the vendor lock-in problem, enabling frictionless system connections through high interoperability.

Connecting Data, the Google Way

The mechanisms within the OriginTrail protocol today closely resemble the way Google utilizes hyperlinks between web pages and manages to understand their data contents (the key factor which differentiated Google from early web page indexes such as Yahoo and later partially evolved into the famous PageRank algorithm), as both technologies harness the power of their respective connection-first data structures, also known as knowledge graphs. However, important differences in the nature of the supply chain IT landscape and the World Wide Web require a more complex approach in building the global supply chain knowledge graph than the one Google has taken, specifically related to data governance, decentralization, and employed standards.