Corruption and lack of transparency remain critical challenges in governance systems around the world. These issues are often perpetuated by centralized systems and their manipulation by system administrators. Furthermore, the lack of data ownership and the monetization of user data by tech companies further increase concerns about transparency. In light of these concerns, this study aims to review existing blockchain-based governance models and identify best-practice governance models focusing on corruption transparency, their characteristics, and components. The research will also examine the role of a token economy in addressing trusted third-party issues related to asset ownership management. Furthermore, we discuss the effect of smart contracts, blockchain, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), Web 3.0, and multifactor challenge set self-sovereign identity authentication (MFSSIA) as modern technologies to combat corruption and achieve transparency in the public sector. To achieve this, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) comprising peer-reviewed journals, proceedings, and book chapters published between 2012 and 2023. Using the SLR methodology, 45 primary and supporting studies have been selected for result extraction and analysis. Finally, we discovered seven blockchain-based governance models with their characteristics and primary components.

Collaboration between schools at a cross-national level requires a secure and trustable system that respects the rules, and policies of the parties, specifically the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) needs to be placed in the system. The GDPR, or similar laws and the curricula differ in respective. Students who want to take any course at another school abroad cannot easily sign in and access the study content, even if that school wishes to share it. Still, this is what society, industry, and education ministries in different countries wish. The schoolgirls in Afghanistan who wish to study online in the girl’s school of Ireland are specifically considered as a case study in this paper. We use a case study research method in which the existing online learning tools are analysed that are used in Irshad High School in Afghanistan and Coláiste Nano Nagle School in Limerick, Ireland. We furthermore prototype the architecture of a system that provides a secure collaboration platform. Thus, this collaboration platform we develop can be adopted at various levels of education for any country with the goal to achieve a long-term effect on the flexibility of the respective education systems to yield a globalization of education. We use the internet, mobile and educational platforms, and a secure broker (interface) that provides the tools for the schools’ collaboration, including the sharing of resources, an exchange of experience and enabling access to education worldwide.

Digitization expansion enables business transactions operating in distributed systems encompassing Internet- and Machine-to-Everything (M2X) economies. Distributed collaboration systems growth comes at a cost of rapidly rising numbers of machines, infrastructure, machine-infrastructure traffic, and consequently a significant augmentation of associated carbon emissions. In order to investigate M2X’s carbon footprint, we design an impact index application layer using blockchain technology of smart contracts to empower a sustainable management of distributed collaboration systems. The impact measurement methodology based on transparent liquid data secures trusted inter-organizational collaborations and supports traceable standardization of sustainability regulation.

Permissionless blockchain-enabled smart contracts execute code in a distributed peer-to-peer network system and thereby overcome undesirable effects of system centralization. Smart contracts that use proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithms for the validation of transactions have advantages over proof-of-work (PoW) in that they use less electricity and perform faster. The disadvantage of PoS algorithms is the issue of nothing to stake and the emergence of staking oligopolies. Thus, significant stakeholders might be able to create an oligopoly as miners with significant stakes have the chance to validate the transaction in a dominant position. In current smart contracts, the adoption of mobile devices is another emerging trend to manage mobile smart contracts. The advantage is spreading of a democratization effect as a large number of stakers participate in transaction validation and thereby reduce the risk of oligopolies. In our work, we aim to improve the PoS algorithm to reduce oligopoly formation in smart contracts by addressing the need for creating mobile smart contracts that are governed by a mobile lifecycle management. Additionally, we enhance the scalability and performance of smart contracts by focusing specifically on ways to incentivize PoS algorithms.

The following topics are dealt with: learning (artificial intelligence); neural nets; pattern classification; feature extraction; feedforward neural nets; convolution; image classification; recurrent neural nets; pattern clustering; support vector machines.

Trading commercial property currently involves several middlemen who are extra time-consuming and cost-consuming elements in a transaction. With recent blockchain-based smart contract innovations, it is possible to use distributed applications (Dapps) for disintermediating third parties and enabling direct peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. The blockchain serves as an immutable, event-recording ledger that facilitates trust-less P2P transactions. The Evareium system is a distributed application for enabling blockchain-based commercial-property trades that make middlemen superfluous and consequently, investors benefit from cost reductions, faster transaction times, greater transparency and reduced regulatory burdens. As a consequence of the Evareium system, investors and other stake-holders are able to avail a direct interface with the creation and dissemination of optimal financial gains from such investments without interdiction. The corresponding Evareium token is structured for governing platform-related incentives. The Evareium token is also intended for Internet-of-Things (IoT) based hotelmanagement services such as controlling hotel-room blindfolds, A/C, smart keys, checkin, spa, restaurant, room service, and so on.

As people engage increasingly with Internet services such as social media, search, and e-retail, they create considerable quantities of data. Well known social-media companies and a secretive data-brokerage industry monetize this personal data without explicitly consulting-or sharing the revenues with-the users who produced the content. Such is the dominant personal-data ecosystem. There is clear need for a transparent and fair data exchange based upon the expressive consent of the Internet users producing the data. This shortpaper specifies such a system built upon a user-controlled ”DataWallet” and a blockchain-based smart contract system to allow transparent and mutually beneficial exchange of data between consenting parties. We detail the requirements of such a system, its necessary structure, and the dynamic interactions of its components and stakeholders through an example focusing on a simple exchange of data for DXT (the data exchange token).

The use of agile methods during software development is a standard practice and user stories are an established way of breaking complex system requirements into smaller subsets. However, user stories do not suffice for understanding the bigger picture of system goals. While methods exists that try to solve this problem, they lack visual tool support and are too heavy for smaller projects. This article fills the gap by evaluating a novel agile agent-oriented modelling (AAOM) method for requirements engineering. The AAOM-method comprises a visual approach to agile requirements engineering that links goal-model creation techniques taken from agentoriented modelling and connects goals intuitively to user stories. A case study based evaluation explores the applicability of AAOM for requirements engineering in an agile software development process.

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. Process views are pivotal to support this way of working. A process view shields secret or irrelevant details from a private business process, thus allowing an organization to reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to partner organizations. This paper introduces a specification framework to support service outsourcing using process views. To enable the construction of process views at various levels of detail, the framework defines several projection relations between process views and the underlying internal processes. To allow consumers and providers of process views to establish an outsourcing relation, the framework defines several matching relations between the respective views that are comprehensive and flexible for service outsourcing. A proof-of-concept prototype tool implements the framework, which is applied in a case study.

Automating business collaboration promises efficiency and effectiveness increases with means of service-oriented cloud computing. For automating cross-organizationally connected business processes operation, existing choreography languages are typically technology driven and focus less on their socio-technical suitability and expressiveness that recognizes the interaction between people in organizations and technology in workplaces. The eSourcing Markup Language (eSML) addresses the gap, extracted from our studies of suitability and expressiveness for supporting the automation of business collaboration. eSML has been applied in case studies and its development approach is replicable for exploring strengths and weaknesses of other choreography languages.

The development of large socio-technical systems is now more feasible with the availability of service-oriented cloud computing although this results in a higher complexity level with respect to security and dependability in service-ecosystems. Additionally, the communication between humans and software is more complex too. Developing system architectures that comprise proactive agents are a means to tackle that complexity. However, there is a lack of socio-technical design methods for generating agent-based architectures that get deployed on platforms as a service in Clouds. Such a method must be easy to comprehend and enactable in a pragmatic way. To demonstrate the method, the paper uses a running case based on an emergency healthcare-provision scenario in homes for elderly in sparsely populated areas.

One of the difficult challenges in inter-enterprise computing is aligning business transactions and technical management of distributed transactions, especially in breach situations. We propose and analyse a two-level business transaction management framework that allows injection of business level concerns to the control processes of inter-enterprise transactions. The two levels are associated with a) the metamodel of the collaboration, captured in eContract governing the collaboration, and b) the transactional interactions between collaboration member services. The two levels are bound together to form a reflective model, while business level breaches to the eContract can disturb the normal interactions, the metalevel possesses processes for managing (rolling back, compensating, ignoring, triggering ecosystem-level consequences) the failure in manners that align with the business incentives. This framework enables correctness, coherence and efficiency of processing in open inter-enterprise environments, i.e., service ecosystems.

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. Process views are pivotal to support this way of working. A process view shields secret or irrelevant details from a private business process, thus allowing an organization to reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to partner organizations. The paper introduces a conceptual framework to support service outsourcing using process views. The framework gives rules that can be used to construct a process view from a conceptual process and vice versa. Based on these rules, the framework defines several projection relations that can exist between conceptual processes of consumers and providers and their process views. Finally, the framework gives a set of configuration options that specify which combinations of projection relations are useful for service consumers and service providers. The framework is applied in a BPEL-based case study.

In the area of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration for manufacturing, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are confronted with the problem of spending considerable time and effort on coordinating suppliers across multiple tiers of their supply chain. In tightly integrated supply chains, the failure of providing services and goods on time leads to interruptions of the overall production and subsequently results in customer dissatisfaction. This paper proposes the concept of electronic Sourcing eSourcing as a consolidating approach for improving the coordination of service provision across several tiers of a supply chain. eSourcing allows for the harmonization of heterogenous system environments of collaborating parties without requiring a total disclosure of internal business details to the counterpart. Furthermore, with tool support in eSourcing, it is possible to verify the correct termination of processes and the contractual adherence of service provision without imposing fixed standardized routing. In this paper features of the eSourcing concept are analyzed in a pattern-based way. This paper pursues an analysis of eSourcing patterns in a top-down way for constructing collaboration configurations. The discovered and specified eSourcing construction patterns of this paper are instrumental in the EU-FP6 project CrossWork for conducting case studies with industry partners from the automobile industry.