Floor Planning Application using Smart Contracts

A blockchain is an interesting recent innovation, which, at its core, is essentially a distributed, decentralized public ledger; a few cryptocurrencies (which make use of a blockchain at its core) have had the feature of smart contracts added to them recently. Smart contracts are pieces of code, a binding contract, which runs on the network; these can be used to store, retrieve and perform other operations on the blockchain. Due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, the possibilities of smart contracts are only beginning to be realized, with many potential applications for the future. This project is a floor planning application that makes use of the preceding smart contracts to store data on the Ethereum network. Floor planning applications are commonly used in construction, and by designers, to represent the overhead structure of a room or set of rooms. Typically, a user would create a plan and save it on their computer, or to cloud storage platforms, and possibly send it to another user later, for review or other purposes. While data loss is less of an issue nowadays, especially with the rising popularity of cloud-based storage solutions which automatically manage storage to minimize risk of data loss, it is not unheard of for disasters to occur which may affect a portion of users. By using the Ethereum blockchain to store data, it is possible to avoid costs associated with that of storage on servers, and in theory, can prevent data loss, or reduce the risk of it occurring by a large amount, due to the redundant storage available due to the distributed nature of the chain. Furthermore, using a blockchain has additional advantages: by its nature, it has the feature of immutability, and by extension, nonrepudiation; since data on a blockchain is public by default, it is also possible to build a "map" of plans which have been stored, allowing for greater collaboration between various interested parties.