ARTCONF researches and develops BaaS consisting of four open-source tools that support the development of trustworthy, secure and scalable Social DApps. Although a small number of platforms (e.g. Steem, AKasha) addressing similar goals exist, ARTICONF is the first European open-source initiative that builds its solution on a Cloud-agnostic BaaS federated infrastructure.
Trust and Integration Controller (TIC) is a Cloud-agnostic BaaS deployed on a federated Cloud infrastructure, currently connected to OpenStack, AWS and Google Cloud. TIC facilitates transparent, secure, reliable and interoperable Social DApp development on a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric blockchain service with high transaction validation throughput. TIC uses Docker Swarm to orchestrate blockchain services, such as smart contract deployment and network performance management. A persistent Cloud storage enables automatic BaaS restart and recovery upon infrastructure failures.
Co-located and Orchestrated Network Fabric (CONF) provides a suite of microservices for planning, provisioning, monitoring, and adapting a customised federated Cloud infrastructure to time-critical Social DApps. CONF uses the TOSCA standard to map Social DApps performance requirements onto federated Cloud infrastructure topology. Further, it deploys DApps by selecting the appropriate Cloud site and the virtual machine that satisfies their time and quality-critical constraints (e.g. deadline, security, distribution, latency). Further, it ensures fast recovery in the presence of faults or performance drops through rapid deployment or migration of Social DApp resources closer to the bottleneck areas.
Semantic Model with self‐adaptive Autonomous Relevant Technology (SMART) is a personalised knowledge-as-a-service tool that augments the DApp network for collaborative and participatory decision-making. It collects semi-structured transaction data from the blockchain, splits them into unique contexts (e.g. location, timestamp), and semantically links through diverse contexts. Afterwards, SMART clusters transactions with similar properties (e.g. locations, times, prices, values) for each context and temporally partitions the cluster groups into stages containing transactions within specific time intervals. The temporally partitioned steps allow discovery of the clusters’ evolution (e.g. growth, shrink) to understand the changing behavioural patterns of Social DApps.
Tools for Analytics and Cognition (TAC) is a guided analytics tool that uses cognitive techniques to enhance engagement between DApp providers and users. TAC provides a suite of microservices based on the Elasticsearch and Kibana stack for Cloud-based data analytics, including data indexing, search, filtering, aggregation, and visual reporting. Initially, TAC uses Logstash to preprocess the aggregated data, apply transformations, and push it to the ElasticSearch tool to process data schemas. ElasticSearch uses document-oriented indexing to associate the parsed data schema with the search entries supplied by the DApp provider. Finally, TAC uses KIbana for Web service-based visual exploration of the analysed data.
The outcome of the ARTICONF project is a BaaS toolset for Social DApp development released on GitHub as a set of four integrated tools under the Apache 2 License at:
https://articonf.eu/results/(öffnet in neuem Fenster). The consortium disseminated the project results in over 70 international publications and over 150 events. Finally, it established the ARTICONF foundation to exploit the BaaS toolset after the project completion.
