Interview: Meet ISLAND project!

Two companies joined forces. One is aiming to exploit its AI capabilities and its Trust and user centricity aspirations in the Blockchain environment. The other specializes in Blockchain technology and on how to leverage the Web3 stack for a more decentralized Internet. The result? ISLAND project! Find out more in this interview with Konstantinos Panagos.

Could you please introduce yourself?

I am Konstantinos Panagos and I represent FourDotInfinity and our partners Redmullet Tech. I am the CEO of FourDotInfinity since early 2021. Together we have proposed ISLAND, a service node within the ONTOCHAIN with hopefully many hop-on and hop-offs.

How did you hear about ONTOCHAIN?

ONTOCHAIN was launched in September 2020, we found out both by social media and interactions with other ecosystem players.

What motivated you to apply?

For FourDotInfinity was the ambition to exploit our AI capabilities and our Trust and user centricity aspirations in the Blockchain environment. We were fortunate to have joined forces with REDMullet that specialize in Blockchain technology and mainly on how to leverage the Web3 stack for a more decentralized Internet. Together we are building ISLAND. Our proposition is to contribute to the ONTOCHAIN’s ecosystem for using blockchain and AI to build trusted knowledge management. The presence of coaches, which by the way we have valued extremely in this phase, the community building and access to resources such as software infrastructure were the add-ons.

How was the application process?

As we have now almost reached the end of this phase, we surely know more than we did when we applied. The application process itself was easy and the documentation self-explanatory. If we were to do it all over again, I’m sure we will have paid attention in a number of areas. For example, we would put even more emphasis on our business case, and of course we would be in very different position in terms of how we see our value within the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem and what benefits the other participants would enjoy when partnering with us.

Can you briefly explain your project and its contribution to the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem?

In collaboration with Red Mullet, we plan to further democratize the use of blockchain networks by providing a set of Web services that would facilitate users to extract pieces of unstructured data from public and private blockchain networks, annotate them with semantic knowledge from Ontologies, and make them interoperable.

One may imagine ISLAND as a middle layer framework that leverages the power of RDF graphs, bootstrapping tools to develop and manage interlinked Semantically-enriched Blockchain data. We will offer enabling knowledge extraction using AI, over ONTOCHAIN’s ecosystem, as well as enable knowledge interoperability within the Internet of Humans; by interlinking on-chain data with knowledge shared by the Universe of Knowledge Graphs.

The ONTOCHAIN project is based on a co-development process, how can you benefit from an experience like this? And what type of synergies are you eager to explore with the other selected teams?

As I said, the experience so far was very positive and that is partially due to the openness of the other teams in partnering, exchanging ideas and innovating on possible ways of cooperation. We have been able to explore services that we could be offered for enhancing our proposition, and services we can provide that are of value to other teams. We aim to position ISLAND as the interoperability layer for ONTOCHAIN, between the applications layer and the core protocols.

What are your expectations regarding the new software ecosystem that ONTOCHAIN will deliver, its contribution to the NGI priority areas, and benefits for end users?

We are proud to be part of this new ecosystem because we believe in the value that ONTOCHAIN delivers in terms of Trusted Knowledge Management and user centricity in the DLT and blockchain world. NGI fosters Inclusion, Trust and Security, so do we! We do believe that it will deliver concrete benefits for end users in those three areas.