Storage and Organisation of Geospatial Data in Distributed Blockchain Using IPFS

The rapid development of global navigation, information and communication technology, and sensor technology, alongside the launch of a vast number of geo-satellites, have led to an unprecedented amount of geospatial data being generated. The need to share and use this data reliably has persisted, and data privacy, integrity, and security have become crucial issues. Guaranteeing these aspects of geospatial data is challenging, given the extensive use of the data in a range of technologies and the fact that it is stored in various formats and calibrated by different standards. Before any comparison, combination, or mapping can occur, data scrubbing and reformatting are necessary. Maintaining data integrity, while sharing or storage, is challenging under these conditions. To preserve the privacy and integrity of geospatial data, the data must be validated and protected from unauthorized modifications. Blockchain has recently emerged as a potential solution to the challenges of geospatial data, as it possesses tamper-proof, traceable, trust-free, transparent, and decentralized characteristics. Blockchain integrates consensus mechanisms, asymmetric cryptographic algorithms, and distributed data storage to achieve these features, making it a promising technology to address the issue. We have proposed a method for storing and accessing geospatial data in the distributed blockchain using InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). We have tested our proposed method using VEDAS SIH dataset, Bhuvan dataset and Kaggle SpaceNet dataset. The test result of the proposed method is efficient, secure, and immutable. The proposed method is compared with the state-of-the-art centralized storage solutions.