Blockchain technology for vector geographic provenance information organization and verification

Provenance is an important research issue of “Neogeography”, and it plays a significant role in judging whether geospatial data is reliable or not. In a distributed collaborative environment, geospatial data provenance also faces reliability issues. Blockchain technology has gained rapid development in recent years due to its characteristics of credibility, transparency, and non-tampering. It provides a new solution to the reliability management of provenance records. However, how to use the blockchain to organize and store a large number of geospatial data provenance with different granularity levels remains a challenge. Therefore, taking vector data as the research object, this paper discusses the requirements in designing the structure of provenance blockchain, and proposes a method of organizing on-chain provenance information at different levels based on Merkle Patricia tree (MPT). Further, an algorithm that is suitable for the verification of vector provenance information is provided.This paper develops a vector data provenance blockchain prototype system, and conducts verification experiments using the vector provenance information. The experiments demonstrate that MPT can achieve higher performance than binary Meckel tree in vector data provenance verification.