Ethical Knowledge Sharing Leveraging Blockchain: An Overview

Abstract

The knowledge that is acquired through a learning process has ethical concerns when shared, as there can be restrictions on the parties who can use the piece of knowledge, redistribution approaches protecting the creator's rights, privacy, and confidentiality concerns, accuracy and trustworthiness, openness and transparency, and informed consent. Blockchain structure encompasses a series of coupled blocks that are intrinsically linked with the conservation of authenticity, ensuring irrefutability, and the semi-anonymity of transactions. As pioneers in reviewing BC-based ethical Knowledge Sharing (KS), we categorize the model into 4 classes and critically evaluate the literature relative to knowledge-associated features, ethical knowledge-sharing aspects, BC-associated features, and network features. We heaped a commencing sample of 69 document references by selecting the literature for eligibility conditions pursued from intellectual resource search platforms, leveraging a profound and overly extended-period technique. We investigate and emphasize that, owing to innate security properties, blockchain can facilitate ethical KS in numerous ways, such as leveraging a dedicated consensus approach for ethical KS (Class 1), leveraging blockchain itself for knowledge storage and sharing due to its mutation-proof, non-tamperable, fault tolerance features (Class 2), ensuring the confidentiality of knowledge by leveraging additional encryption techniques on blockchain (Class 3), and leveraging smart contracts for attribute-based searching, knowledge fusion, access control, reward-driven KS, etc. (Class 4). Critical evaluation unveils that from BC-based ethical KS frameworks, 50% utilize smart contracts with blockchain for knowledge-based activities, 90% leverage progressive BC architecture, 6.7% leverage proof-of-knowledge consensus, 93.4% share propositional knowledge, and 70% share explicit knowledge. Moreover, accuracy, openness and transparency, privacy, trustworthiness, truthfulness, and confidentiality have been the dominant factors in ethical KS principles of interest. Finally, we examine the openings and hurdles of the model of blockchain-based ethical KS, then propose actions to diminish them, and afterward present future directions, implications, and limitations for the concept.