Features and Capabilities of a Blockchain-Based Ridesharing Enhanced with Semantics

The integration of blockchain platforms with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies is increasingly frequent in research and industry. Semantic Web technologies provide peculiar opportunities, since they have been devised for information interoperability at Web scale and enable intelligent software agents for knowledge-driven task automation and decision support. The paper presents a blockchain platform extending Hyperledger Sawtooth with Knowledge Representation and Reasoning features. Semantic Smart Contracts allow annotated resource registration, discovery –leveraging non-standard inference services for semantic matchmaking–, explanation –exploiting logic-based justification provided by the adopted inferences– and selection. A prototypical semantic-enhanced ridesharing service has been built to validate the proposed framework and a time-series data collection infrastructure has been deployed for performance analysis.