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Digital archive of theses discussed at the University of Pisa

 

Thesis etd-11212018-010903


Thesis type
Tesi di laurea magistrale
Author
BASILE, MARIANO
URN
etd-11212018-010903
Thesis title
A blockchain-based approach for digital archives: a decentralized Ethereum application for the safeguarding of the cultural heritage.
Department
INGEGNERIA DELL'INFORMAZIONE
Course of study
COMPUTER ENGINEERING
Supervisors
relatore Prof. Dini, Gianluca
relatore Prof.ssa Bernardeschi, Cinzia
Keywords
  • "Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali"
  • blockchain
  • cultural heritage
  • Dapp
  • digital archive
  • digital preservation
  • distributed ledger
  • Elasticsearch
  • Ethereum
  • IPFS
  • recordkeeping
  • Web 3.0
Graduation session start date
11/12/2018
Availability
Full
Summary
The recordkeeping process in an accounting system usually results in the form of a digital archive. In case of a structured collection of data, a digital archive is maintained as a database and it is usually under the supervision of a single organization. There are different issues related to these kinds of solutions.
First, data being stored are controlled by specific organizations. Second, the problem of the single-point-of-failure, particularly common in Web 1.0. With Web 2.0, cloud providers started offering cheap scalable service, but we don't like the way scalability and fault-tolerance is achieved.
With respect to the use case considered, a specific database called “Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali” was examined.
The goal of this work was to develop a distributed and efficient solution, both from an economic and performance viewpoint, that was able to overcome the above mentioned problems while ensuring authenticity, privacy, integrity and long-term data availability.
We have considered an Ethereum-based architecture so to guarantee three out of four of the above properties, respectively: authenticity, integrity and availability.
Moreover an off-chain data storage approach by means of a p2p file system named InterPlanetary File System has been adopted.
A database was also still required. In this respect the choice was to use a "document store"-type NoSQL database called Elasticsearch.
Finally the privacy requirement has been achieved at application level.
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