BATDIV: A Blockchain-based Approach for Tourism Data Insertion and Visualization

Paper presented at IEEE 2021 IoT Vertical and Topical Summit for Tourism. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9604903

This is an early version of a demonstrator of BigchainDB based architecture, which is used as a permissioned blockchain.

The data entry is performed by connecting SurveyJS to the blockchain.

The data visualization is provided via web browser using Plotly library.

The plotted graphs are retrieved by querying MongoDB.

The graphic representation is provided through a Node.js application, which makes use of Express.js as a middleware web framework to allow the communication between web browser and database.

The following components are required:

• BigchainDB 2.2.1,
• MongoDB 3.4 or newer,
• Tendermint 0.31.5 ,
• Node.js.

This demonstrator has been developed using Ubuntu 18.04.

1.Backend

Bigchaindb

To install BigchainDB please follow the steps indicated in [1], avoiding the usage of NGINX.

These are the steps performed to install the version 2.2.1:

1.Installing pip for python3:

sudo apt install python3-pip

2. use pip3 to install bigchaindb

sudo pip3 install bigchaindb==2.2.1

configure bigchaindb running:

bigchaindb configure

MongoDB

To check if the version in the repository is correct:

apt-cache policy mongodb

After verifying that is the correct one, to install it:

sudo apt install mongodb

To check if mongodb is running:

systemctl status mongodb

Tendermint

To install tendermint we also installed unzip.

sudo apt install unzip

then we used wget to download the tendermint zip file.

unzip tendermint_v0.31.5_linux_amd64.zip

mv the directory to /usr/local/bin

sudo mv tendermint  /usr/local/bin

Initialize it with

tendermint init

To allow members to connect each other is fundamental to configure the file config.toml as explained in [1]

Monit

Monit is used to run and monitor tendermint and bigchaindb. It will restart them if they crashed.

sudo apt install monit

As explained here, you will be able to run the bigchaindb-monit-config script, which will be in your PATH. Running the script is required to build a configuration file for Monit:

bigchaindb-monit-config  

To run monit:

monit -d 1

2.Frontend

Data entry: survey compilation

To complete the Survey we create our forms on SurveyJS.io, and we use the related SurveyID.

In data_entry/survey_and_transaction.js it is shown the surveyID value that identify our survey administered to Tourists.

The Javascript code shown here is called inside data_entry/index.html, and through that code the data are inserted in the blockchain in JSON format.

Graphical visualization

To visualize the data inserted in the blockchain, we used a node.js application installed on one of the nodes.

To install node.js:

sudo apt install npm

These packages are required by our application:

npm install [email protected]
npm install [email protected]
npm install [email protected]
npm install [email protected]
npm install express -–save
npm install jquery

This is the package.json file.

The code of our node.js application can be found here.

To interact with the node.js application there are 2 Javascripts files, calculate.js and myFunctions.js, that are loaded into an html page.

Experiments.

In the test directory there are files used during the experiments, and a description of the test carried on.

Here are some videos of the experiments:

5 nodes experiment:

9 nodes shells:

10 nodes experiment:

References

1. How to Set Up a BigchainDB Network