ONTOCHAIN Open Call 1: Apply for up to €123k of funding for your idea or project!
By: Anthony Simonet-Boulogne
Tags: Blockchain, Tech, European Union, Press Release

The EU-funded project ONTOCHAIN has reserved €4.2 Million euros of funding to develop a new ecosystem for trusted, traceable, and transparent ontological knowledge management. With iExec, OntOchain will fund innovative projects and applications that could play a role in this ecosystem.

For open call #1, up to 18 project proposals will be selected to receive the first funding award. The goal of these proposals is to provide functional and technical specifications illustrating how your project can bring value to the ONTOCHAIN framework.

Selected projects will receive up to €123k (for Open Call #1), with free access to infrastructure, coaching and technical support.

Over the course of the 7-month program (of open call #1), participants will receive up to €123k (equity-free funding), with technical support for the iExec platform.

How does it work?

In the first phase of the program the 18 selected projects will start by conceptualizing a research project for one of the following topics:

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

Funding is provided for each phase of Call #1. Six of the 18 projects will proceed to the second phase, receiving further funding to elaborate on their proposal made in Phase 1. Phase 2 will prepare design specifications to be implemented. In addition, the best projects will be awarded for the publication of their outcomes.

Learn more about the open call and each phase of the process below:

Apply before 15 January 2021(17:00) CET via the F6S platform.

ONTOCHAIN funding — the timeline:

The trusted knowledge ecosystem will be built by a large, open body of European stakeholders, supported by the OntoChain consortium partners. The project will follow agile software development methods and invite eligible members of European countries to contribute to specific tasks via three successive open calls (further divided into two to three phases):

Call #1: Research stakeholders from different vertical sectors will be invited to produce research proposals with functional and technical specifications for the framework. Call #1 is broken down into phases (more information on the open call 1 timeline can be found here).

stakeholders from different vertical sectors will be invited to produce research proposals with functional and technical specifications for the framework. Call #1 is broken down into phases (more information on the open call 1 timeline can be found here). Call #2: Foundations on year two experts and enthusiasts will be invited to build components of the OntoChain framework, guided by real use-cases and results produced during the first year.

on year two experts and enthusiasts will be invited to build components of the OntoChain framework, guided by real use-cases and results produced during the first year. Call #3: Application & Experimentation building on results from the first two calls, practitioners will be invited to implement real-world technical solutions and business applications contributing to a sustainable and democratic ecosystem.

Free infrastructure and support for iExec and other technical stacks:

In contributing to the scope of OntoChain, applicants will be encouraged to use and extend existing software solutions from various OntoChain partners, including those from iExec. During the process, iExec will offer its decentralized platform and products to the NGI community and will provide support for improving them and integrating them in the OntoChain ecosystem. This includes the iExec decentralized cloud marketplace (a perfect example of a platform where providers are rewarded fairly for their contributions); the iExec Data Wallet and trusted computing solutions, which can be used to monetize datasets while maintaining ownership; and the Proof-of-Contribution (PoCo) consensus protocol that keeps full data provenance and traceability of how data is used in a competitive network.

Other examples of what can be done with the iExec technical stack include Decentralized & Trusted Oracles, Trusted executions (TEE) and Confidential Computing, Privacy-preserving applications, GPU applications, Tokenization & monetization of assets (NFTs), Support for ENS (Ethereum Name Service) and much more!

“Today, digital life is an extension of our physical world and demands the same critical, moral and ethical thinking. By bringing ONTOCHAIN to you and building it with you we expect to contribute to a more distributed and transparent internet that respects and promotes the fundamental values of diversity, equality, privacy and participation.”