What is "Data Certification"?

Data Certification supports scientifically honest work.

By certifying a manuscript, it can be proven at a later point in time that it had a certain content at the time of distribution. This can protect the author's copyright.

The certification of data can be used to prove that data sets were not changed later. This prevents empirical surveys from being adapted to hypotheses.

Functionality

When creating a certification, a unique fingerprint of a file (the so-called hash value) is calculated and logged in the "Austrian Public Service Blockchain" in an unchangeable manner together with a time stamp. The Austrian Public Service Blockchain is used by public sector institutions, including Federal Computing Center, City of Vienna, Austrian Chamber of Commerce and the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

If at a later point in time it is to be verified that the file in question already existed at the alleged point in time or has not been changed since then, the data is retrieved from the blockchain and compared with the information available.