Blockchain-based Cross-organizational Workflow Platform

Data-centric workflows across organizations are gaining more and more popularity. To automate this process, the traditional approaches centralise related data from different organizations to the cloud, and then use a workflow engine to complete cross-organizational collaboration. There are limitations of those approaches, such as the requirement of data centralisation which could lead to the leakage of critical data. In this work, we present a workflow platform for consuming distributed data based on Kubernetes and JupyterFlow, and use blockchain technology to guarantee security and privacy through empowering the data owner with control of their own data. To reduce replication and network throughput, the blockchain only contains the meta data referring to the data in off-chain storage. We develope a JupyterHub extension to support data registration and query, and used the RESTFul API to connect the web application with the blockchain network. Finally, we demonstrate a simple data processing use case as proof-of-concept to validate our proposed platform.