BOCA: A novel semantic blockchain-based authentication system of educational certificates

Abstract

In industrial and academic working environments, illegitimate academic certificates have been prepared by individuals who aim to be employed without completing regulated training and education programs. This violation has made an unjust confusion between genuine and fake certificates. Within the hiring process, employers thus need a reliable mechanism for verifying academic certificates that ensures the integrity of data. In accordance with this aim, blockchain technology has been introduced and deployed at some universities supporting fraud prevention or secure access to certificates. However, the method of handling knowledge in these educational systems was not investigated devotedly. This paper introduces an authentication framework of educational certificates that employed blockchain and ontology technologies, named BOCA. The learning ontology (LeOn), which was used to represent the central knowledge model of the system, was assigned to semantically manage the domain knowledge and link the educational data to the blockchain network. The system features, including the working process, the LeON ontological development, and the rule base construction, are described in detail. The system deployment on Hyperledger Fabric yielded promising experimental results. Ongoing work focuses on improving system performance and allowing semantic search on data blocks.

KEYWORDS:

• Certificate authentication
• blockchain
• semantic technology
• ontology
• hyperledger fabric

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of domain experts and ontology engineers who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://openbadges.org/

2 https://www.w3.org/RDF/

3 https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/

4 https://www.w3.org/OWL/

5 https://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/

6 https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

7 https://protege.stanford.edu/

8 https://www.topquadrant.com/products/topbraid-composer/

9 https://github.com/

10 http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

11 https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/

12 https://www.hyperledger.org/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Minh Duc Nguyen

Minh Duc Nguyen is a lecturer at the Department of Economic Information Systems, University of Economics, Hue University, Vietnam. He obtained his M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in Information Systems from Inje University, Korea in 2017 and 2021, respectively. His current research topics are data mining, text mining, natural language processing, knowledge management, and recommendation systems.

Cuong H. Nguyen-Dinh

Cuong H. Nguyen-Dinh obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Sciences, Hue University, Vietnam and Khon Kaen University, Thailand in 2005 and 2016, respectively. He is currently a lecturer at the School of Engineering and Technology, Hue University. His current research topics are data mining and text mining, knowledge management, and recommender systems.

Le Anh Phuong

Le Anh Phuong is the Rector of the University of Education, Hue University, Vietnam. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Informatics from Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam; and a B.S. degree in Mathematics Education from the University of Education, Hue University, Vietnam. His research interests include computer vision, natural language processing, semantic web, decision support system, etc.