Modeling and Preserving Greek Government Decisions using Semantic Web Technologies and Permissionless Blockchains

We present a re-engineering of Diavgeia, the Greek government portal for open and transparent public administration. We study how decisions of Greek government institutions can be modeled using ontologies expressed in OWL and queried using SPARQL. We also discuss how to use the bitcoin blockchain, to enable government decisions to remain immutable. We provide an open source implementation, called DiavgeiaRedefined, that generates and visualizes the decisions inside a web browser, offers a SPARQL endpoint for retrieving and querying these decisions and provides citizens an automated tool for verifying correctness and detecting possible foul play by an adversary. We conclude with experimental results illustrating that our scheme is efficient and feasible.