ONTOCHAIN is a new software ecosystem for trusted, traceable & transparent ontological knowledge management funded by the European Commission as part of the Next Generation Internet initiative (NGI).

“BABELFISH HAS BEEN SELECTED AS ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST PROJECTS FOR BUILDING THE NEXT GENERATION INTERNET IN EUROPE”

Alluding to the project name, Babelfish comes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Babelfish is a small yellow fish that when placed in someone’s ear translates any language into their first language. This project proposes to describe services on a technical, semantic, and governance layer and will implement a component that uses such descriptions to translate interfaces (APIs), data, and data agreements from a foreign (and maybe proprietary format) to an interoperable format understood by the recipient. A registry maintains a list of all services and thus spans up an interoperable data space.

The building blocks to build a common data space are (i) Semantic Container (SemCon) for technical interoperability - enabling to connect APIs and handling authentication as well as processing aspects; (ii) Semantic Overlay Architecture (SOyA) for data harmonisation - using RDF and JSON-LD for data model management and aligning & transforming data models on the fly; (iii) Data Agreements - covering data governance, tracking provenance metadata and act as usage policies between services describing rules for the use of data. These building blocks can use either decentralised Self-sovereign identities (SSIs) technologies like Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to ensure immutability in a trustless environment or connect to available trust anchors on traditional client server architectures.

Babelfish enables interoperability on technical (API), semantic (data model alignment), and governance (data agreements) layer and ensures integration being trustworthy, reproducible, and decentralized.

A core element of our project is to demonstrate integrating stakeholders in supply chain management and to selectively share purpose-driven data within the rising regulative framework of Digital Product Passports for short supply chains in the food sector.

We are actively integrating stakeholders to demonstrate an impactful use case for simplified, granular production and transport labels between the following supply chain role models:

• Product Owner

• Transport Service Provider

• Supply Chain Party

• Market Maker

• Regulator

• Region

Interview: Meet Babelfish project!

Babelfish project office @Climate Lab

Spittelauer Lände 45
1090 Vienna, Austria