  An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining
provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods--e.g. tracking
ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury
goods--has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and
transported in complex, inter-organizational, often internationally-spanning
supply chains. Recent adoption of Internet of Things and Blockchain
technologies give promise at better supply chain provenance. We are
particularly interested in the blockchain as many favoured use cases of
blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying
ontologies as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance,
traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a
case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this
case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its
representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce
traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.
