Browsing by Subject "blockchain"

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    Open Access
    A Blockchain-enabled System to enhance Food Traceability in Local Food Supply Chains (FSCs) suitable for Small Co-operatives in South Africa
    (2021) Kanjere, Julian; Georg, Co-Pierre
    Food is vital to human life. Therefore, ensuring its safety as it moves from producer to consumer in food supply chains (FSCs) is essential. This can be achieved through the use of food traceability technology which enables track and trace of produce within a FSC. Recently, blockchain technology (BCT) has shown great potential to enhance traceability in FSCs, owing to its ability to securely store data in a decentralised and tamper-evident manner. However, it appears that research on blockchain-enabled food traceability exists primarily within the context of large FSCs, whilst scarce for local FSCs in which traceability is often an inefficient and manual process. Given this background, this exploratory research is carried out, to investigate whether a blockchain-enabled system can be used to improve traceability in local FSCs. To do this, we (i) collaborate with Oranjezicht City Farm Market (OZCFM) - a farmers market in Cape Town, the smallholder farmers that supply OZCFM with fresh local produce and the OZCFM patrons that purchase the produce; (ii) map out the local FSC by conducting observations and running surveys with the aforementioned actors; (iii) design, develop and pilot FoodPrint - a web based and blockchain-enabled food traceability application. During the pilot within the OZCFM-related local FSC, FoodPrint is used to capture data on the harvest, transportation and storage of produce; and reveal produce provenance at destination by scanning of supplier-produce specific quick response (QR) codes. We find that FoodPrint provides tamper-evident traceability and authentic transparency of produce related data to the local FSC actors. Further, we note that scanning a FoodPrint QR code for produce provenance does not enhance the consumers trust of the local FSC, as it pre-exists. This implies that local FSCs with existing and functional trust mechanisms do not benefit from trust-enhancing mechanisms such as blockchain-enabled traceability. Future work may consider data privacy in FSCs and automating FSC data entry to reduce the risk of fraud.
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    Open Access
    How to attribute credit if you must
    (2021) Meiklejohn, Luke S; Georg, Co-Pierre
    Data ownership is of fundamental importance in the digital economy of today. Commercializing academic research, whilst maintaining ownership of it, is a task that can now be accomplished due to the strengths of blockchain technology, which allows data to be registered, made unique, and traced to its origins. We propose a blockchain use-case for licencing academic research, based off an academic project named UniCoin. In this thesis, we discuss how to fairly attribute credit between all sources of knowledge that contribute to new pieces of academic research, using citation network analysis and centrality measures. Katz centrality, in-degree centrality, and PageRank are three potentially useful centrality measures, with varying results: these are compared using case studies based on three papers co-authored by Andrei Shleifer. We use these centrality measures to guide how to fairly attribute credit, and thus how to distribute licencing revenues generated through UniCoin.