Christian Cachin, Angelo De, Pedro Moreno-Sánchez, Björn Tackmann · 5 authors
The advent of Bitcoin paved the way for a plethora of blockchain systems supporting diverse applications beyond cryptocurrencies. Although in-depth studies of the consensus protocols as well as the privacy of blockchain transactions are available, there is no formal model of the transaction semantics that a blockchain is supposed to guarantee.
Kevin Wittek, Dominik Krakau, Neslihan Wittek, James H. Lawton · 5 authors
Proof of Existence as a blockchain service has first been published in 2013 as a public notary service on the Bitcoin network and can be used to verify the existence of a particular file in a specific point of time without sharing the file or its content itself. This service is also available on the Ethereum based bloxberg network, a decentralized research infrastructure that is governed, operated and developed by an international consortium of research facilities. Since it is desirable to integrate the creation of this proof tightly into the research workflow, namely the acquisition and processing of research data, we show a simple to integrate MATLAB extension based solution with the concept being applicable to other programming languages and environments as well.
Over the past decade, vast amounts of machine-readable structured information have become available through the automation of research processes as well as the increasing popularity of knowledge graphs and semantic technologies. \nToday, we count more than 10,000 datasets made available online following Semantic Web standards. \nA major and yet unsolved challenge that research faces today is to perform scalable analysis of large-scale knowledge graphs in order to facilitate applications in various domains including life sciences, publishing, and the internet of things. \nThe main objective of this thesis is to lay foundations for efficient algorithms performing analytics, i.e. exploration, quality assessment, and querying over semantic knowledge graphs at a scale that has not been possible before. \nFirst, we propose a novel approach for statistical calculations of large RDF datasets, which scales out to clusters of machines. \nIn particular, we describe the first distributed in-memory approach for computing 32 different statistical criteria for RDF datasets using Apache Spark. \nMany applications such as data integration, search, and interlinking, may take full advantage of the data when having a priori statistical information about its internal structure and coverage. \nHowever, such applications may suffer from low quality and not being able to leverage the full advantage of the data when the size of data goes beyond the capacity of the resources available. \nThus, we introduce a distributed approach of quality assessment of large RDF datasets. \nIt is the first distributed, in-memory approach for computing different quality metrics for large RDF datasets using Apache Spark. We also provide a quality assessment pattern that can be used to generate new scalable metrics that can be applied to big data. \nBased on the knowledge of the internal statistics of a dataset and its quality, users typically want to query and retrieve large amounts of information. \nAs a result, it has become difficult to efficiently process these large RDF datasets. \nIndeed, these processes require, both efficient storage strategies and query-processing engines, to be able to scale in terms of data size. \nTherefore, we propose a scalable approach to evaluate SPARQL queries over distributed RDF datasets by translating SPARQL queries into Spark executable code. \nWe conducted several empirical evaluations to assess the scalability, effectiveness, and efficiency of our proposed approaches. \nMore importantly, various use cases i.e. Ethereum analysis, Mining Big Data Logs, and Scalable Integration of POIs, have been developed and leverages by our approach. \nThe empirical evaluations and concrete applications provide evidence that our methodology and techniques proposed during this thesis help to effectively analyze and process large-scale RDF datasets. \nAll the proposed approaches during this thesis are integrated into the larger SANSA framework.
There are thousands of projects worldwide based primarily on blockchain technology. These have a large number of users and hundreds of use cases. One of the most popular is the use of cryptocurrencies and their benefits against money without intrinsic value (fiat money) and centralized financial solutions. However, although thousands of new transactions are carried out daily in different platforms, uniform and standardized information does not exist to be able to manage the large amount of data that is generated and exchanged between users through transactions and the generation of new blocks. This research reports the development of BLONDiE, an ontology that allows the semantic representation of knowledge to describe the native structure and related information of the three most relevant blockchain projects to date: Bitcoin, Ethereum and in the recent 1.0 version extends its definitions to include Hyperledger, specifically the Hyperledger Fabric infrastructure. Its use allows having common data formats of different platforms for further processing, such as the execution of semantic queries.
Ignacio Huitzil, Alvaro Fuentemilla, Fernando Bobillo
This paper proposes a novel extension of blockchain systems with fuzzy ontologies. The main advantage is to let the users have flexible restrictions, represented using fuzzy sets, and to develop smart contracts where there is a partial agreement among the involved parts. We propose a general architecture based on four fuzzy ontologies and a process to develop and run the smart contracts, based on a reduction to a well-known fuzzy ontology reasoning task (Best Satisfiability Degree). We also investigate different operators to compute Pareto-optimal solutions and implement our approach in the Ethereum blockchain.
This paper is a progress report on our recent work on two applications that use Linked Data and Distributed Ledger technologies and aim to transform the Greek public sector into a decentralized, trusted, intelligent and linked organization. The first application is a re-engineering of Diavgeia, the Greek government portal for open and transparent public administration. The second application is Nomothesia, a new portal that we have built, which makes Greek legislation available on the Web as linked data to enable its effective use by citizens, legal professionals and software developers who would like to build new applications that utilize Greek legislation. The presented applications have been implemented without funding from any source and are available for free to any part of the Greek public sector that may want to use them. An important goal of this paper is to present the lessons learned from this effort.
Maribel Acosta, Tim Berners‐Lee, Stefan Dietze, Anastasia Dimou · 9 authors
Decentralised data solutions bring their own sets of capabilities, requirements and issues not necessarily present in centralised solutions. In order to compare the properties of different approaches or tools for management of decentralised data, it is important to have a common evaluation framework. We present a set of dimensions relevant to data management in decentralised contexts and use them to define principles extending the FAIR framework, initially developed for open research data. By characterising a range of different data solutions or approaches by how TRusted, Autonomous, Distributed and dEcentralised, in addition to how Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, they are, we show that our FAIR TRADE framework is useful for describing and evaluating the management of decentralised data solutions, and aim to contribute to the development of best practice in a developing field.
Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Arash Pourdamghani
In today's cryptocurrencies, Hashcash proof of work is the most commonly-adopted approach to mining. In Hashcash, when a miner decides to add a block to the chain, she has to solve the difficult computational puzzle of inverting a hash function. While Hashcash has been successfully adopted in both Bitcoin and Ethereum, it has attracted significant and harsh criticism due to its massive waste of electricity, its carbon footprint and environmental effects, and the inherent lack of usefulness in inverting a hash function. Various other mining protocols have been suggested, including proof of stake, in which a miner's chance of adding the next block is proportional to her current balance. However, such protocols lead to a higher entry cost for new miners who might not still have any stake in the cryptocurrency, and can in the worst case lead to an oligopoly, where the rich have complete control over mining. \n \nIn this paper, we propose Hybrid Mining: a new mining protocol that combines solving real-world useful problems with Hashcash. Our protocol allows new miners to join the network by taking part in Hashcash mining without having to own an initial stake. It also allows nodes of the network to submit hard computational problems whose solutions are of interest in the real world, e.g.~protein folding problems. Then, miners can choose to compete in solving these problems, in lieu of Hashcash, for adding a new block. Hence, Hybrid Mining incentivizes miners to solve useful problems, such as hard computational problems arising in biology, in a distributed manner. It also gives researchers in other areas an easy-to-use tool to outsource their hard computations to the blockchain network, which has enormous computational power, by paying a reward to the miner who solves the problem for them. Moreover, our protocol provides strong security guarantees and is at least as resilient to double spending as Bitcoin.
Each manufacturer, supplier, and retailer has its own chain of collaborating stakeholders to meet their customer demands. Many perspectives can be taken like food safety, security, and sustainability, which may each lead to separate solutions that are not necessarily interoperable with each other. Data can only be shared within the context of those solutions and only with extra effort, and thus costs, across these solutions. To address this solution, this paper proposes a methodological approach for specification of data that can be shared with rapid deployment by for instance a blockchain based - or a peer-to-peer infrastructure. The methodological approach is based on basic informatics principles like the Turing machine and ontologies.
We present an approach to verify off-chained information using Linked Data, Smart Contracts, and RDF graph hashes stored on a Distributed Ledger. We use the notion of a Linked Pedigree, i.e. a decentralised dataset for storing hyperlinked information, as modelling foundation. We evaluate our approach by comparing different ways to build the Smart Contract. We develop a cost model and show, based on our implementation, that for managing multiple Linked Pedigree instances, a single larger Smart Contract is superior to multiple smaller Smart Contracts for supply chains shorter than 50 participants.
Paula Peña, Rocío Aznar, Rosa Montañés, Rafael Alonso
The project presented has been financed by Government of Aragon and is part of the ''Open Data'' initiative promoted by that organization. Given the amount of unstructured information related to the Government of Aragon currently published on the Internet, with slightly or no standardization and decentralized, it emerges the need to gather it systematically to be offered to all interested collectives from a single access point in a public and structured way. Within this context, ''Aragon Open Data'' project aims to collect, organize, store and maintain updated, Administration''s web information by means of human language and semantic technologies. Firstly, crawling is performed over websites in order to retrieve textual data over which Natural Language Processing (NLP) and ontology-based techniques are applied. Thereafter, results are stored into NoSQL databases, allowing future open access and simple data exploitation. NLP techniques used in the project involve named-entities recognition and classification (NERC) and texts semantic classification and summarization.
Jan 1, 2018·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
The concept of blockchain technology has gained significant momentum in practice and research in the past few years, as it provides an effective way for addressing the issues of anonymity and traceability in distributed scenarios with multiple parties, which have to exchange information and want to securely collaborate with each other. However, up-to-date, the impact of the structure and setup of business networks on successfully applying blockchain technology, remains largely unexplored. We propose a model-driven approach, combining an ontology and a layer model, that is capable of capturing the properties of existing blockchain-driven business networks. The layers are used to facilitate the comprehensive description of such networks. We also introduce the Blockchain Business Network Ontology (BBO), formalizing the concepts and properties for describing the integral parts of a blockchain network. We show the practical applicability of our work by evaluating and applying it to an available blockchain use case.
We study the problem of argument systems, where a computationally weak verifier outsources the execution of a computation to a powerful but untrusted prover, while being able to validate that the result was computed correctly through a proof generated by the prover. In addition, the zero-knowledge property guarantees that proof leaks no information about the potential secret input from the prover. Existing efficient zero-knowledge arguments with sublinear verification time require an expensive preprocessing phase that depends on a particular computation, and incur big overhead on the prover time and prover memory consumption. This thesis proposes new constructions for zero-knowledge arguments that overcome the above problems. The new constructions require only a one time preprocessing and can be used to validate any computations later. They also reduce the overhead on the prover time and memory by orders of magnitude. We apply our new constructions to build a verifiable database system and verifiable RAM programs, leading to significant improvements over prior work.
Bitcoin is one of the first decentralized, peer to peer, payment systems based on the so-called Proof-of-Work (PoW). PoW is an algorithm that requires the computation of a hard function in order to gain access to a resource but, at the same time, the correctness of the computed result should be easily checked. The use of a PoW removes the necessity of a centralized third party and so the consistency of the network may be altered directly by the involved users. Peers, to solve the PoW more efficiently, usually organize themselves into mining pools, to increase the overall computational power: this situation, unfortunately, leads to a network centralization. In this paper we consider two typical scenarios of a Bitcoin network and we model them by probabilistic logic programming (PLP): the centralization of the hashing power by large pools and the “double spending attack”. In the first one, we verify the effectiveness of a protocol that attempts to discourage the formation of large pools. In the second one, we compute the probability of success of an attacker. Both scenarios are modeled using the PLP package cplint.
Jan 1, 2018·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Blockchains permit to store information in a tamper-resistant and irrevocable manner by reverting to distributed computing and cryptographic technologies. The primary purpose is to keep track of the ownership of tangible and intangible assets. In the paper at hand we apply these concepts and technologies to the domain of knowledge management. Based on the explication of knowledge in the form of enterprise models this permits the application of so-called knowledge proofs for a. enabling the transparent monitoring of knowledge evolution, b. tracking the provenance, ownership, and relationships of knowledge in an organization, c. establishing delegation schemes for knowledge management, and d. ensuring the existence of patterns in models via zero-knowledge proofs. To validate the technical feasibility of the approach a first technical implementation is described and applied to a fictitious use case.
At the beginning of 2018, there is a growing belief that blockchain technologies constitute a revolutionary innovation in how we transfer value electronically. In that vein, blockchain may be a suitable complement to ontologies to achieve a big part of the vision of the semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee. We believe that if this complementarity is to be achieved blockchain and ontologies must co-evolve. In this paper, we focus on what and how to engineer models, methods, designs, and implementations for this co-evolution. As a first step in this co-evolution, we propose a conceptual design of a governance ontology represented as meta-data tags to be embedded and instantiated in a smart contract at the blockchain protocol level. We develop this design by examining and analyzing smart contracts from the infamous The DAO experiment on the Ethereum blockchain. We believe there are two contributions of this paper: it serves to inform and implore the blockchain and ontology communities to recognize and collaborate with each other; and it outlines a roadmap for engineering artifacts to bridge the gap between blockchain community focus on protocol-level blockchain interoperability and the ontology community focus on semantic-level interoperability.
In recent years, the concept of Zero Knowledge Protocols (ZKP) as a useful approach to nuclear warhead verification has become increasingly popular. Several implementations of ZKP have been proposed, driving technology development toward proof of concept demonstrations. Whereas proposed implementations seem to fall within the general class of template-based techniques, all physical implementations of ZKPs proposed to date have a complication: once the instrumentation is prepared, it is no longer authenticatable; the instrument physically contains sensitive information. In this work we explore three different concepts that may offer more authenticatable and practical ZKP implementations and evaluate the sensitive information that may be at risk when doing so: sharing a subset of detector counts in a preloaded image (with spatial information removed), real-time image subtraction, and a new concept, CONfirmation using a Fast-neutron Imaging Detector with Anti-image NULL-positive Time Encoding (CONFIDANTE). CONFIDANTE promises to offer an almost ideal implementation of ZKP: a positive result is indicated by a constant rate at all times enabling the monitoring party the possibility of full access to the instrument before, during, and after confirmation. A prototype of CONFIDANTE was designed, built, and its performance evaluated in a series of measurements of several objects including a set of plutonium dioxide Hemispheres. Very encouraging results proving feasibility are presented. 1 Rebecca is currently a graduate student in Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley
All human interaction can be depicted as exchanges. We exchange trivial information, feelings, assets and more. Valuable exchanges have one thing in common; they all require some degree of trust. In today’s society we rely on institutionalized trust when commencing an exchange of value. Typically, this role is filled by a vast ecosystem consisting of commercial banks, clearinghouses and other third parties. The recent rise of Bitcoin, Ethereum and consequent attention on the underlying technology, blockchain, questions the future of current ecosystem. This report aims at uncovering what blockchain is, what different implementations are currently available and how it would affect today’s ecosystem. It does so through semistructured interviews with actors within the current ecosystem as well as weighing in the views of blockchain evangelists. It highlights five key aspects that are crucial when implementing blockchain technology within the existing banking paradigm. Today’s organized societies require law and order which, to a large extent, is limited within the realm of public blockchain technology. With the insight of society’s infrastructural limitations, this paper argue that the current transaction system of our society favors a permissioned implementation with trusted nodes. Such a system would result in more efficient financial markets and lower costs of transacting. However, this paper acknowledge the virtues and reasons behind the rise of public blockchains. Given recent developments within the field and interesting concepts, the report does not dare to exclude a future of banking relying on public blockchain technology as the underlying database.
Hubert Ritzdorf, Karl Wüst, Arthur Gervais, Guillaume Felley · 5 authors
An internet user wanting to share observed content is typically restricted to primitive techniques such as screenshots, web caches or share button-like solutions. These acclaimed proofs, however, are either trivial to falsify or require trust in centralized entities (e.g., search engine caches). This motivates the need for a seamless and standardized internet-wide non-repudiation mechanism, allowing users to share data from news sources, social websites or financial data feeds in a provably secure manner. Additionally, blockchain oracles that enable data-rich smart contracts typically rely on a trusted third party (e.g., TLSNotary or Intel SGX). A decentralized method to transfer web-based content into a permissionless blockchain without additional trusted third party would allow for smart contract applications to flourish. In this work, we present TLS-N, the first TLS extension that provides secure non-repudiation and solves both of the mentioned challenges. TLS-N generates non-interactive proofs about the content of a TLS session that can be efficiently verified by third parties and blockchain based smart contracts. As such, TLS-N increases the accountability for content provided on the web and enables a practical and decentralized blockchain oracle for web content. TLS-N is compatible with TLS 1.3 and adds a minor overhead to a typical TLS session. When a proof is generated, parts of the TLS session (e.g., passwords, cookies) can be hidden for privacy reasons, while the remaining content can be verified.
Searching for information in distributed ledgers is currently not an easy task, as information relating to an entity may be scattered throughout the ledger with no index. As distributed ledger technologies become more established, they will increasingly be used to represent real world transactions involving many parties and the search requirements will grow. An index providing the ability to search using domain specific terms across multiple ledgers will greatly enhance to power, usability and scope of these systems.
Meaningfully automating sociotechnical business collaboration promises efficiency-, effectiveness-, and quality increases for realizing next-generation decentralized autonomous organizations. For automating business-process aware cross-organizational operations, the development of existing choreography languages is technology driven and focuses less on sociotechnical suitability and expressiveness concepts and properties that recognize the interaction between people in organizations and technology in workplaces. This gap our suitability- and expressiveness exploration fills by means of a cross-organizational collaboration ontology that we map as a proof-of-concept evaluation to the eSourcing Markup Language (eSML). The latter we test in a feasibility case study to meaningfully support the automation of business collaboration. The developed eSourcing ontology and eSML is replicable for exploring strengths and weaknesses of other choreography languages.
Quality Control in Fact-Finding is, above all else, a very welcome addition to the literature on international fact-finding. Whilst there has been a marked increase in the number of fact-finding inquiries established in the last couple of decades,1 this has not been matched by a similar increase in the number of scholarly studies of such inquiries.2 In light of both the number and high-profile nature of such inquiries, the absence of scholarship focusing squarely on the contemporary role of inquiries up to the present day seems like an oversight. This collection, published in open access format by Florence-based, not-for-profit ‘academic EPublisher’ Torkel Opsahl (named after the late Professor Opsahl who himself briefly chaired the Commission of Experts for the Former Yugoslavia until his untimely death in 1993), attempts to address this lack of academic attention. The collection ostensibly sets out to ‘make a contribution to the emerging discourse on fact-finding mechanisms’ by ‘focusing specifically on quality awareness and quality improvement in non-criminal justice fact-work’ (at viii). Its accessible style, open access format, and the breadth of topics covered will attract the attention not only of international legal scholars, but practitioners and policy-makers too. In the opening chapter Marina Aksenova and Morten Bergsmo provide a helpful overview of the concept of international fact-finding itself and of the fact-finding missions established in recent decades. The authors define the concept of fact-finding broadly as a method of ascertaining facts used in international relations for differing purposes (at 2), before noting that traditionally there are three main purposes for establishing facts in international law. The first is the narrow purpose of fact-finding ‘in cases where differences of opinion on factual matters underlie a dispute between parties’, for which a procedure of inquiry was set out in the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions, and which has fallen into desuetude.3 The second purpose is that of supervising the execution of international agreements typically carried out by the UN Specialized Agencies, and the third purpose is fact-finding for the purposes of Article 34 of the UN Charter, namely the power of the Security Council to investigate any situation or dispute that may endanger international peace and security. The overview of fact-finding missions established by principal UN organs, subsidiary organs, national governments, and various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), helpfully set out in the form of a table in the opening chapter, provides a valuable introduction to the subject. Commentators in the past have lamented the lack of a standard operating procedure for fact-finding missions.4 However, a recurring theme of this collection is caution against standardization in light of the inherently context-specific nature of international fact-finding inquiries. Richard Goldstone states that ‘[i]t is folly to generalise about fact-finding missions. Each situation will have its unique features. What works with regard to one may well fail if applied to another’ (at 52). Similarly, Martin Scheinin argues in favour of the maintenance of clear functional distinctions between inquiries, in particular asserting that the ‘various mechanisms of mainstream human rights bodies that seek to establish state responsibility for human rights violations should not be subjected to the evidence requirements typical for determining individual criminal accountability’ (at 54). Particularly insightful contributions to the collection are those in which the authors are able to draw on their own practical experience, such as the chapters by Goldstone, Scheinin, Chris Mahony, and David Re. Goldstone’s contribution provides a potentially crucial insight into the mind of a man who has been heavily involved in a number of landmark fact-finding missions, both domestic and international. Much of Goldstone’s account focuses on two domestic inquiries that he led in South Africa, namely the Sithole Inquiry into the death of a member of the ANC in detention shortly before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in February 1990, and the Sebokeng Inquiry into the action of police during a mass protest-match in March 1990. The relevance of the discussion of these domestic inquiries to a collection on international fact-finding is perhaps not immediately apparent; however Goldstone’s vast experience allows him to make a number of broad proposals for improving the quality of future international fact-finding missions. Amongst them the lessons learned from the Sithole Inquiry in which the transparent nature of the inquiry (which was held in a Johannesburg City Hall instead of a courtroom with no visible security and large public galleries) created a more ‘public-friendly’ atmosphere and insulated it from political interference, and the proposals for opening the appointment process for members of commissions to public scrutiny, are amongst the most helpful and practical proposals. Goldstone’s contribution is also instructive regarding his involvement in the UN Human Rights Council’s Gaza inquiry in 2009, as it illuminates the political machinations ‘behind the scenes’ that led to the formation of the inquiry and possibly is indicative of the political process that has led to the establishment of other commissions of inquiry. Similarly interesting is the issue of consent and cooperation – the refusal of Israel to cooperate with the inquiry clearly impeded the Commission’s operation and was apparently the cause of many of the ‘sleepless nights’ that Goldstone subsequently suffered (at 50). The lack of cooperation, coupled with new facts subsequently coming to light, put Goldstone in the position where he felt he had to row back on some of the inquiry’s factual findings in a Washington Post opinion-editorial. This episode cautions against reliance on any findings-of-fact derived from an inquiry with restricted access to the area investigated, and a resultant need to rely to a much greater extent on secondary sources and press reports. The critical remarks of Wu Xiaodan that Goldstone’s change of heart and the furore surrounding Professor Christine Chinkin’s alleged bias had cast some doubt on the credibility and impartiality of the Goldstone Report provide a useful counterpoint to Goldstone’s chapter (at 201) although an even more robust critique was perhaps warranted. Similarly, Scheinin draws on decades of practical experience in his contribution dealing with fact-finding in the context of treaty-based human rights mechanisms and the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council. Scheinin’s contribution provides a helpful typology of the fact-finding apparatus and organizational structure of treaty-based fact-finding mechanisms, including the reporting procedure, individual complaints, and inquiries. Perhaps the most useful part of this contribution is the section dealing with Special Procedures in which the thoughts of an experienced practitioner are key, given the nature of the topic that would otherwise be largely impenetrable to most. For instance, the contribution explores the two fact-finding functions of Special Rapporteurs, namely communications (letters) to governments and country visits. Scheinin is critical of the communications function, noting that the response rate to letters is low and the information gained from communications is such that they cannot be considered a fact-finding mechanism at all. However, Scheinin is able to draw on his own experience as Special Rapporteur, having paid visits to states such as Turkey and Tunisia, and is positive about governmental compliance with requests made by Special Rapporteurs, access to areas under investigation, and ultimately even the uncovering of facts that could later be used for a number of purposes including criminal prosecution. Among the most important contributions to the collection is that of Mahony dealing with the security implications for witnesses appearing before fact-finding commissions. This extended, detailed, contribution draws on the author’s own experience in Nepal, and both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Special Court in Sierra Leone. Whilst having a relatively narrow focus on a small number of situations, the author’s own first-hand experience and the level of detail and practical examples provided allow important conclusions to be drawn regarding means of ensuring the safety of witnesses, including details of the legal regime needed for witness protection, consideration of the crucial issue of funding, and more practical issues such as personnel and the institutional location of the programme that could potentially be of use in the context of other commissions. David Re’s contribution is based on his involvement in the criminal courts in the Former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone and poses a fundamentally important question: what did the ICTY trial and appeals chamber actually do with UN and NGO fact-finding reports? Interestingly, Re shows that relatively minimal (at least explicit) use was made of such factual findings by the ICTY chambers between 1994 and 2013. Most often such findings were utilized as investigative leads for the prosecutor (at 296). Further, Re argues that the findings-of-fact made by such inquiries are likely to be more politically and historically important than judicially influential (at 280). The conclusions to be drawn from this argument are not fully fleshed out, but it is submitted that it is fundamentally important for the future of international fact-finding that they are considered. Tackling more theoretical issues, Simon De Smet’s contribution addresses the theoretical foundations of fact-finding. He takes as his starting point that most fact-finders approach the subject intuitively; ‘[e]ven though they may display great care and circumspection in making their findings, they do not necessarily have a strongly developed understanding of what the underlying principles and concepts of fact-finding are’ (at 74). De Smet provides a helpful introduction to the epistemology of fact-finding and evidence (at 80) and takes us through important theoretical issues such as the epistemology of how beliefs can be justified, including both probabilistic or Bayesian epistemology and so-called ‘inference to best explanation’ or relative plausibility theory. In doing so De Smet seeks to provide the basis for improving the overall epistemic quality of fact-finding, without making any claims that doing so would in actual fact improve the accuracy of fact-finding in practice. De Smet tackles a wide array of the goals he has set for himself with relish, although one gets the impression that there is simply not enough space to do justice to the substantial number of important issues ranging from philosophical conceptions of probability to the epistemology of testimony, trustworthiness, competence, and cognitive consensus, to name just a few. While the author’s forthcoming monograph will provide a more in-depth analysis,5 in the context of this collection, it might have been better to choose a smaller number of discrete issues and explore them in greater detail, but this is a minor quibble. Despite claiming to deal with non-criminal justice fact-finding (at viii) international criminal law inevitably finds its way into the collection through the contribution by Dov Jacobs and Catherine Harwood which considers the use of international criminal law (ICL) by fact-finding commissions. More specifically, the contribution assesses the creep of international criminal law concepts into the work of fact-finding missions and considers the utility of ICL in general ‘outside the courtroom’. The contribution highlights a number of concerns regarding the use of such concepts in fact-finding inquiries, including the problematic use of the criminal law burden and standard of proof in non-judicial situations which raise issues of due process. For instance, cursory legal determinations of complex situations and divergent legal determinations between different commissions of inquiry have caused controversy in recent times.6 The contribution ultimately concludes that not only does the use of ICL concepts not help to solve some of the operational problems that fact-finding inquiries face, it in effect creates a number of new problems (at 353). Whilst this contribution complements excellent existing work in this field,7 the topic of fact-finding in international criminal law remains one of the most under-researched areas of fact-finding and further research in this area, where the personal liberty of individuals is at stake, is undoubtedly needed. Other contributions address selected issues including quality control in the context of truth and reconciliation (Liu Daqun at Chapter 5), how commissions of inquiry can provide international prosecutors with the background information they need on specific international criminal law situations (Lyal S. Sunga at Chapter 13), fact-finding difficulties encountered by NGOs (Wolfgang Kaleck and CarolijnTerwindt at Chapter 14), and the role of information technology in the work of fact-finding commissions (Ilia Utmelidze at Chapter 16). In the penultimate chapter Charles Garraway provides a contribution on the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission established under Article 90 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which has never been used to date, but which could be of potential use in the future according to the author, although its competences are in some crucial respects limited in scope. Mention is made of these contributions in order to highlight the sheer breadth of the collection, which endeavours to cover so many discrete and diverse issues in relation to international fact-finding. Ultimately, Quality Control in Fact-Finding is a commendable attempt to address the paucity of literature in an area of international law that is seen as increasingly significant. Whilst a final concluding chapter drawing together some of the main themes and findings of the collection would have been welcome, it contains some genuinely useful contributions, in particular those in which the authors are able to draw on their own experience and those which attempt to systematize and make sense of the operation of international fact-finding. Marina Aksenova and Morten Bergsmo, Non-Criminal Justice Fact-Work in the Age of Accountability; Richard J. Goldstone, Quality Control in International Fact-Finding Outside Criminal Justice for Core International Crimes; Martin Scheinin, Improving Fact-Finding in Treaty-Based Human Rights Mechanisms and the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council; Simon De Smet, Justified Belief in the Unbelievable; Liu Daqun, Quality Control in Truth and Reconciliation Processes; Fan Yuwen, Quality Control and the Mandate of International Fact-Finding; Isabelle Lassée, Coherence in the Design and Implementation of the Mandates of International Fact-Finding Commissions: Internal and External Dimensions; Wu Xiaodan, Quality Control and the Selection of Members of International Fact-Finding Mandates; Dan Saxon, Purpose and Legitimacy in International Fact-Finding Bodies; Chris Mahony, Witness Sensitive Practices in International Fact-Finding Outside Criminal Justice: Lessons for Nepal; David Re, Fact-Finding in the Former Yugoslavia: What the Courts Did; Dov Jacobs and Catherine Harwood, International Criminal Law Outside the Courtroom: The Impact of Focusing on International Crimes for the Quality of Fact-Finding; Lyal S. Sunga, Can International Criminal Investigators and Prosecutors Afford to Ignore Information from United Nations Human Rights Sources?; Wolfgang Kaleck and Carolijn Terwindt, Non-Governmental Organisation Fact-Work: Not Only a Technical Problem; Charles Garraway, Fact-Finding and the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission; Ilia Utmelidze, Information Technology and Quality Control in Non-Criminal Justice Fact-Work.
Narendra Kunapareddy, Parsa Mirhaji, David Richards, S. Ward Casscells
Although the decentralized and autonomous implementation of health information systems has made it possible to extend the reach of surveillance systems to a variety of contextually disparate domains, public health use of data from these systems is not primarily anticipated. The Semantic Web has been proposed to address both representational and semantic heterogeneity in distributed and collaborative environments. We introduce a semantic approach for the integration of health data using the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) developed by the Semantic Web community.
We show simple constant-round interactive proof systems for problems capturing the approximability, to within a factor of n , of optimization problems in integer lattices, specifically, the closest vector problem (CVP) and the shortest vector problem (SVP). These interactive proofs are for the coNP direction; that is, we give an interactive protocol showing that a vector is far from the lattice (for CVP) and an interactive protocol showing that the shortest-lattice-vector is long (for SVP). Furthermore, these interactive proof systems are honest-verifier perfect zero-knowledge. We conclude that approximating CVP (resp., SVP) within a factor of n is in N P ∩co A M . Thus, it seems unlikely that approximating these problems to within a n factor is NP-hard. Previously, for the CVP (resp., SVP) problem, Lagarias et al. (1990, Combinatorica 10 , 333–348), Håstad (1988, Combinatorica 8 , 75–81), and Banaszczyk (1993, Math. Annal. 296 , 625–635) showed that the gap problem corresponding to approximating CVP (resp., SVP) within n is in N P ∩co N P . On the other hand, Arora et al. (1997, J. Comput. System Sci. 54 , 317–331) showed that the gap problem corresponding to approximating CVP within 2 log 0.999 n is quasi-NP-hard.