Decentralized News-Retrieval Architecture Using Blockchain Technology

Adrian Alexandrescu () and Cristian Nicolae Butincu ()
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Adrian Alexandrescu: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering, Gheorghe Asachi Technical University of Iasi, 700050 Iasi, Romania
Cristian Nicolae Butincu: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering, Gheorghe Asachi Technical University of Iasi, 700050 Iasi, Romania

Mathematics, 2023, vol. 11, issue 21, 1-26

Abstract: Trust is a critical element when it comes to news articles, and an important problem is how to ensure trust in the published information on news websites. First, this paper describes the inner workings of a proposed news-retrieval and aggregation architecture employed by a blockchain-based solution for fighting disinformation; this includes a comparison between existing information retrieval solutions. The decentralized nature of the solution is achieved by separating the crawling (i.e., extracting the web page links) from the scraping (i.e., extracting the article information) and having third-party actors extract the data. A majority-rule mechanism is used to determine the correctness of the information, and the blockchain network is used for traceability. Second, the steps needed to deploy the distributed components in a cloud environment seamlessly are discussed in detail, with a special focus on the open-source OpenStack cloud solution. Lastly, novel methods for achieving a truly decentralized architecture based on community input and blockchain technology are presented, thus ensuring maximum trust and transparency in the system. The results obtained by testing the proposed news-retrieval system are presented, and the optimizations that can be made are discussed based on the crawling and scraping test results.

Keywords: blockchain; cloud computing; decentralized architecture; information retrieval; news aggregation; OpenStack; web crawler; web scraper (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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