Smart Ledger Geostamping: Steps Towards Interoperability & Standards

Abstract

Long Finance’s Distributed Futures research programme is pleased to announce the release of its first three approaches to ‘geo-stamping’, along with a short guide. Time-stamping is an important part of Smart Ledgers (aka block-chains with embedded code), an authoritative record of the time of a transaction. Geo-stamping is a mirror image, an authoritative record of the location of a transaction. Geo-stamping = time-stamping + geo-location information. Long Finance’s Distributed Futures research programme has an open source project, “GeoGnomo” to research and share methods for geo-stamping. Geo-stamping benefits from having memorable ways of recording areas that also aid efficient retrieval. GeoGnomo has built-to-share three approaches for recording areal information, a Quaternary Triangular System, a Quaternary Rectangular System, and a Variable Rectangular System for geo-stamping. Each can be used to record geographic areas into a block-chain. GeoGnomo provides source code and an online translation from latitude & longitude areas to geo-codes and back. Thus, block-chain applications have almost an instant ‘global post code’ or ‘global zip code’ system. By using consistent geo-coding data retrieval is easier. Users can share information easily – “tell the drone to come to F49PUR9B7-20”, a resolution of 7.6 metres. This report was commissioned by the Cardano Foundation in November 2017 and is one of the first outputs from a series of projects in the Distributed Futures research programme. Michael Parsons, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, comments “Geo-stamping and time-stamping are two of the most important functions of Smart Ledgers. Our sponsorship of Distributed Future’s GeoGnomo project is directed at sharing mechanisms for geo-stamping that are memorable, aggregable, proximable, and scalable.”