Introduction: Advancements in biomedical research depend on the quality and availability of biological samples. Despite their sophisticated storage capabilities, biobanks face significant challenges in sample management, with stored specimens often remaining unused and researchers struggling to access the required samples. Objectives: To analyze the challenges in biospecimen access and traceability, evaluate existing solutions, and propose a framework for integrated sample management in global research collaboration. Methods: A scoping review was conducted across PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases, supplemented by grey literature (2004–2024). The analysis included an examination of Biobank Information Management Systems and an evaluation of sample management systems, tracking technologies, and governance frameworks. Results: The analysis revealed fragmented management systems, with at least 38 different biobanking software solutions offering limited interoperability. Proprietary systems and vendor lock-ins create significant barriers to data sharing. Sample tracking shows the evolution from manual to digital systems; however, cross-institutional tracking remains challenging. Reproducibility issues account for significant challenges in research, whereas inefficient resource utilization persists, with 67% of biobanks citing underutilization as a major concern. Conclusions: Addressing biobank sample access and traceability requires a shift from an institution-centric to an ecosystem-wide approach. Its success depends on integrating technological solutions such as Blockchain, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence with governance frameworks while ensuring alignment with stakeholder needs. Future developments should focus on implementing integrated traceability systems that support transparent and accountable sample management across the global research ecosystem.

Public sector organizations face growing pressure to modernize service delivery through digitalization while ensuring transparency, interoperability, and citizen trust. Although blockchain technology offers promising capabilities for addressing these challenges, the absence of clear architectural guidelines for public sector contexts limits effective adoption. This study proposes BRA-PS, a Blockchain Reference Architecture for Public Sector Citizen-Centric Applications, developed from a realworld digitalization project in Quebec, Canada. The architecture organizes components into six layers (presentation, business, communication, smart contract, blockchain, and data) with cross-cutting concerns addressing governance, access control, security, and monitoring. A key design principle is the publicprivate workflow separation, which enables inter-organizational collaboration while preserving each organization’s operational autonomy and data confidentiality. We validated the architecture through a case study involving a vehicle registration process between two public agencies, supported by a proof-of-concept implementation using Hyperledger Fabric. An Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) evaluation, conducted with a panel of five domain experts, identified six architectural risks, including IPFS confidentiality exposure and smart contract inflexibility, six non-risks, six sensitivity points, and six trade-offs across three key quality attributes: autonomy, collaboration, and functional suitability. The results confirm that BRA-PS effectively guides implementation decisions and stakeholder alignment. Practical recommendations derived from the evaluation provide actionable guidance for blockchain adoption in public sector services.

Traceability mechanisms ensure transparency and accountability in distributed systems, where autonomous entities interact concurrently with shared resources without complete knowledge of the global state. Most existing approaches are descriptive: they record interactions after execution without constraining them according to the predefined usage rules. This limitation is important when shared resources must be accessed in compliance with global constraints under concurrent executions. We introduce directed traceability as a protocol-level mechanism that governs interaction admission according to usage constraints and produces a compliant execution trace by construction. Unlike descriptive mechanisms or locally-validated approaches such as smart contracts, which enforce only local constraints, directed traceability achieves compliance through execution-time validation against global state. We formalize the problem through a multi-agent model and establish three theoretical properties: (i) directed mechanisms guarantee zero violation rate; (ii) descriptive and locally-validated mechanisms exhibit structural violations under concurrency and global constraints; and (iii) directed traceability induces a bounded latency overhead of O(k · (n+m)), where k is the number of constraints, n the number of agents, and m the number of resources. Numerical evaluation through a distributed container-based implementation yields violation rates of 28%–35% (descriptive), 5%–10% (locally validated), and 0% (directed); a rise to 10% violations for local validation under global constraints; and a latency factor of approximately 100× for the directed mechanism under the tested container-based deployment. Compliance follows from protocol design rather than post-execution audit.

Public sector organizations are under increasing pressure to modernize service delivery while preserving transparency, interoperability, accountability, and citizen trust. Blockchain technology offers relevant capabilities for these objectives, particularly through shared ledgers, cryptographic verification, and programmable rules. However, its adoption in public sector contexts remains constrained by the lack of architectural guidance tailored to inter-organizational services. This study proposes BRA-PS, a Blockchain Reference Architecture for Public Sector Citizen-Centric Applications, developed from a real-world digitalization project in Quebec, Canada. The architecture organizes components into six layers (presentation, business, communication, smart contract, blockchain, and data) with cross-cutting concerns addressing governance, access control, security, and monitoring. A key design principle is the public–private workflow separation, which enables inter-organizational collaboration while preserving each organization’s operational autonomy and data confidentiality. We validated the architecture through a case study involving a vehicle registration process between two public agencies, supported by a proof-of-concept implementation using Hyperledger Fabric. An Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method (ATAM) evaluation, conducted with a panel of five domain experts, identified six architectural risks, including InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) confidentiality exposure and smart contract inflexibility, six non-risks, six sensitivity points, and six trade-offs across three key quality attributes: autonomy, collaboration, and functional suitability. The results show that BRA-PS can support implementation decisions, clarify stakeholder responsibilities, and expose relevant architectural trade-offs. The recommendations derived from the evaluation provide practical guidance for the adoption of blockchain in citizen-centric public sector services.

As the blockchain landscape evolves, the emergence of diverse blockchain platforms designed for specific use cases provides an opportunity to combine their strengths. One way to take advantage on this is to compose specialized services across multiple heterogeneous blockchains. Just as microservices revolutionized cloud platforms, decentralized service composition can similarly transform the way blockchain-based software systems are developped and unlock new use case. This early-stage paper presents an initial Ph.D. research proposal on decentralized service composition applications (dXapps) as a new blockchain application paradigm to address this need. dXapps allow practitioners to combine modular blockchain services, leveraging different chains based on suitability, into integrated applications.