Published on: 2013-10-11T11:27:49+00:00
Melvin Carvalho is working on porting crypto currencies to the semantic web, allowing new types of innovation and spreading bitcoin information to a wider audience. The first step is to create a "vocabulary" for bitcoin, which is like a dictionary of terms that can be put down in a machine-readable standard called RDF. To do this, he asks if anyone has worked on this before or if there is a human readable "glossary" for bitcoin that he could take text from. He has made a start on creating the vocabulary and is hosting it at https://w3id.org/cc.During a discussion on April 1st, 2013 about hosting schemas for Bitcoin on the internet, Melvin Carvalho suggested using bitcoin.org, but noted that it lacked https and Github does not allow for setting mime types. Another participant in the discussion suggested using a subdomain such as schema.bitcoin.org to point to an independently run server for the files. The suggestion was made to address the issue of security and effective management of the files.In an email exchange between Harald Schilly and Melvin Carvalho on April 1, 2013, the discussion centered around creating a "vocabulary" for Bitcoin. Schilly suggested checking existing databases like OKFN and searching for existing vocabularies for payments rather than reinventing it. He provided links to various payment protocols such as http://schema.org/PaymentMethod, http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1#PayPal, and http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/search/#s=payment. Carvalho was already familiar with most of this work and planned to reuse as much as possible, but some terms would be Bitcoin specific. He found https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_glossary and wondered where to host it. Schilly gave three ideas for hosting: bitcoin.org, w3id.org, and bitcoin.it wiki.The use case for modeling all crypto currencies, starting with bitcoin, is that a publisher would like to link their web page content or app to a bitcoin address so that donations can be received by those who have enjoyed their work. The model will be something like URI -> crypto-currency-address -> bitcoin-address and the folks at w3id.org have offered to use their permanent identifier switchboard, then redirect to a locked-down vocabulary. As an implementer, one simply needs to add a single rel= tag to their markup. In a web page or HTML5 app, one can use href="bitcoin:1234....". For litecoins (coming soon), one can use href="....">. It's just a small step to start with but can allow all sorts of entities to start accepting bitcoin in a way that complies with the W3C best practices. Melvin will be improving and extending this over time and feedback or help is welcome.In conclusion, Melvin Carvalho is working on porting crypto currencies to the semantic web by creating a vocabulary for bitcoin in machine-readable format. He is seeking input and assistance from others who have experience in this area. During discussions, suggestions were made to host the schemas for Bitcoin on independent servers to address security concerns. Additionally, existing databases such as OKFN were recommended to search for established vocabularies for payments. The ultimate goal is to enable web pages and apps to link to bitcoin addresses for receiving donations, thereby promoting wider acceptance of bitcoin.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T04:35:32.733838+00:00