ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1 Statistics

The first ONTOCHAIN Open Call dedicated to the setting of design specifications for ONTOCHAIN ecosystem around 6 topics -  Applications, semantic interoperability, on-chain data management, off-chain knowledge management, ecosystem economy, ecosystem scalability and integration -  was open between the 15th of November and the 15th of January 2021.
A total of 137 proposals were submitted.

The target audience of ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1 were researchers, innovators and developers, whether from high tech companies including SMEs, academia or natural person(s) legally established in an EU Member State, H2020 associated countries, or Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) linked to the Member States.

Profile of Applicants and Technology Domains of Expertise

Applicants were asked whether they were applying as:

• a group of individual(s) and organization(s)
• a group of individuals (team)
• a group of organisations (consortium)
• a natural person
• a single organisation (legal entity)

Out of the 137 applications, 68% were submitted by a single organisation, 17% by a consortium, 8% by a group of individuals, 4% by a natural person and 3% by a group of individual(s) and organization(s).

At the same time, applicants were asked to select their technology domain of expertise as follows:

• Data & AI, Vertical applications
• Decentralised solutions, blockchain, distributed ledger
• Measurement, monitoring, analysis & abuse handling, Data & AI, Resilient, robust and dependable
• Services & Applications (e.g. email, instant messaging, search, video chat, collaboration, community), Privacy and confidentiality, Social good, fairness and ethical behaviour,  Empowerment and self-determination
• Software Engineering (Including protocols, interoperability and fundamentals e.g. cryptography, algorithms, proofs), Decentralised solutions, blockchain, distributed ledger
• Trustworthiness (Including: transparency, auditability and security), Social good, fairness and ethical behaviour, Data & AI

The expertise domains among the 137 applications were distributed as represented in the following figure.

Countries

This Open Call 1 received proposals from 29 countries. Spain (14%), Italy (13%), France (11%), Estonia (7%), Netherlands (6%), Germany (6%) and Greece (5%) were the countries the most represented. A large number of countries were covered thanks to the communication and dissemination efforts in getting participants from all eligible countries.

ONTOCHAIN Topics Selected

For setting the design specifications of the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem, the applicants could choose one of the 6 topics:

• Applications
• Semantic interoperability
• On-chain data management
• Off-chain knowledge management
• Ecosystem economy
• Ecosystem scalability and integration

The distribution of applications received among the 6 topics is represented in the figure below, which shows “Applications” as the topic chosen by the majority of applicants(52%), followed by “Semantic interoperability”(21%), “Ecosystem economy”(20%), “Off-chain knowledge management”(18%), “On-chain data management”(17%) and finally “Ecosystem scalability and integration” (8%). Note that a secondary choice was made possible for the applicants among these 6 topics.

Proposals Selected

After the evaluation process, only 18 proposals (3 per topic) were selected from the 137 proposals submitted, leading to an overall success rate of 13%.

Funding Allocation per Countries

By rules, the ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1 funds have been distributed to the legal representative of the legal entity or of the consortium. In that last case, a consortium agreement has been signed by the parties belonging to the consortium mentioning the amount shared between them. The figure hereafter shows the funding distribution per countries, taking into account only the legal representative’s countries, as well as only Open Call 1 phase 1. In phase 2 only 6 projects among the 18 selected will remain and will be funded, thus the funding repartition per country might evolve.