The ability of tracing states of logistic transportations requires an
efficient storage and retrieval of the state of logistic transportations and
locations of logistic objects. However, the restriction of sharing states and
locations of logistic objects across organizations from different countries
makes it hard to deploy a centralized database for implementing the
traceability in a cross-border logistic system. This paper proposes a semantic
data model on Blockchain to represent a logistic process based on the Semantic
Link Network model where each semantic link represents a logistic
transportation of a logistic object between two parties. A state representation
model is designed to represent the states of a logistic transportation with
semantic links. It enables the locations of logistic objects to be derived from
the link states. A mapping from the semantic links to the blockchain
transactions is designed to enable schema of semantic links and states of
semantic links to be published in blockchain transactions. To improve the
efficiency of tracing a path of semantic links on blockchain platform, an
algorithm is designed to build shortcuts along the path of semantic links to
enable a query on the path of a logistic object to reach the target in
logarithmic steps on the blockchain platform. A reward-penalty policy is
designed to allow participants to confirm the state of links on blockchain.
Analysis and simulation demonstrate the flexibility, effectiveness and the
efficiency of Semantic Link Network on immutable blockchain for implementing
logistic traceability.