Distributed Ledgers (DLs) have emerged as a novel way to manage and exchange different types of digital assets among a large number of agents operating in a decentralised way. Existing DL platforms are driven by use cases from different user communities. Each community has its own requirements regarding the level of decentralisation, privacy, and identity management that the ledger would need to offer. To allow for these developments to be applicable to a wider, and more
complex range of applications, they will need to be able to interoperate, both with existing distributed systems and databases technologies, and among each other. This has motivated researchers and practitioners to look at approaches such as Linked Data, which relies on core Web principles and standards such as URIs, HTTP, JSON-LD, RDF, and SPARQL.

We envision the workshop as a forum for researchers and practitioners from Distributed Ledgers and Linked Data to come together to discuss common challenges; propose solutions to shortcomings of existing architectures; and identify synergies for joint initiatives. The ultimate goal is the creation of a Web of Interoperable Ledgers.

The first edition of LD-DL will be held as part of WWW 2017 in Perth, Australia

We invite original research submissions addressing any of the following two broad themes:

Linked Data for Distributed Ledgers:

Vision, insight and research on how to use Linked Data and Web technologies to enhance Distributed Ledgers, including but not limited to:

• Architectures and protocols for DL interoperability
• Architectures and protocols for interoperability between DLs and other Web components and architectures (non-ledger based web services, web databases, etc)
• Extensions of web data models and formats to accommodate Distributed Ledgers (JSON, HTTP, HTML, RDF, etc)
• Languages and query engines for Distributed Ledgers
• Privacy considerations of interoperating Distributed Ledgers
• Vocabularies and ontologies for describing DLs and Smart Contracts

• Semantification and linking of DL frameworks and their contents
• Storage, querying and updating RDF data inside Distributed Ledgers
• SPARQL extensions to use it as a Smart Contract language. Extensions to current Smart Contract languages to use semantic data.

Distributed Ledgers for Linked Data:

Vision, insight and research on how to use DLs to enhance Linked Data and Web applications, including, but not limited to:

• Decentralisation and disintermediation of web-based architectures.
• Distributed management of identity and online identity.
• Distributed Ledger backing of general Linked Data processes: vocabulary
and dataset evolution, entity naming and re-naming, etc.
• DLs for Web and Linked Data provenance.
• DL-backing of Web signatures
• Digital rights management and enforcing