A disruptive technology often used in finance, Internet of Things (IoT) and healthcare, blockchain can reach consensus within a decentralised network—potentially composed of large amounts of unreliable nodes—and to permanently and irreversibly store data in a tamper-proof manner. In this paper, we present a reputation system for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). It considers the users interested in traffic information as the main actors of the architecture. They securely share their data which are collectively validated by other users. Users can choose to employ either such crowd-sourced validated data or data generated by the system to travel between two locations. The data saved is reliable, based on the providers’ reputation and cannot be modified. We present results with a simulation for three cities: San Francisco, Rome and Beijing. We have demonstrated the impact of malicious attacks as the average speed decreased if erroneous information was stored in the blockchain as an implemented routing algorithm guides the honest cars on other free routes, and thus crowds other intersections.
We explore some recurring socio-technical problems encountered in the development of infrastructure for sharing and re-using data across sites and social scales for eHealth research. We link these problems to contradictions between underlying assumptions about data as a commodity whose reuse is not compromised when it is extracted from the context in which it has been captured, and the reality of data as entangled with, and constituted through, local practice. To illustrate these problems, we draw on the experiences of a number of HealthGrid projects developing infrastructures for data sharing and reuse, and trace the strategies that have evolved to address them. These experiences problematize the “one size fits all” model initially adopted by HealthGrids, and highlight the need for design and development strategies that are able to engage with local needs and thereby ensure that the technical infrastructure is properly aligned with the human infrastructure it is supposed to support.