Blockchain Enabled Distributed Storage and Sharing of Personal Data Assets

Personal data are important information assets. Data sharing has potential of creating value to data owners as well as causing security and privacy concerns. Distributed storage solutions have emerged as an approach adhering to the Privacy-by-Design principles and in combination with blockchain technologies enable data and value exchange within communities of Internet users. The paper elaborates an approach for efficient distributed data storage and sharing, where access control is provided using the blockchain technologies and data searching and retrieval are facilitated using a knowledge base. A conceptual model and data management processes are elaborated and a prototype is developed. The prototype is used in experimental studies to compare data storage usage and data retrieval speed for the proposed approach and on-chain storage.