Blockchain for Open Data – Exploring Conceptual Underpinnings and Practice

There has been a sustainable development of the concept of blockchain as one of the key technology innovations changing the business landscapes. Blockchain has been used as a lever for enforcing accountability and responsiveness in different contemporary information and knowledge management environments. The core principle of blockchain is that it promotes the use of technology tools and platforms to achieve anonymous vetting of integrity for different types of information. Together with relatively new concepts such as Open Data, blockchain stands a chance to be practically utilised in different socio-economic establishments. The synthesis of blockchain and Open Data presently opens up requisite implementation of Freedom of Information (FoI) bills which many countries around the world have enacted into laws. A lot of researchers are jumping onto the bandwagon of exploring ways of how blockchain can be used in solving contemporary complex human problems. As a result, a lot of conceptual designs and underpinnings are coming up everyday from both practitioners and researchers. Anchoring the philosophical underpinning on descriptive informetrics, this chapter employs a focused and detailed bibliometric analysis of work that has been published in applied scholarly and practical outlets such as in Scorpus, Emerald, Elsevier, journals, etc., to delve deeper into the contours of blockchain. The chapter discusses formulaic definitions and concepts surrounding blockchain and Open Data with a special focus in the integration of the two concepts for practical application in real-world environments. It is hoped that exploring the formulaic underpinnings of blockchain and Open Data will open up avenues for consolidating their usage into the different contextual socio-economic set-ups.