Toward the Ontological Modeling of Smart Contracts: A Solidity Use Case

Blockchain has become a pervasive technology in a wide number of sectors like industry, research, and academy. With the emergence of blockchain, new solutions with this technology to existing problems were devised, leading to the introduction of smart contracts. Smart contracts are similar to tradit...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2021, Vol.9, p.140156-140172
Main Authors: Cano-Benito, Juan, Cimmino, Andrea, Garcia-Castro, Raul
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Blockchain
Blockchains
Codes
Contracts
Cryptography
Domains
Interoperability
Java
Knowledge representation
Ontologies
Ontology
Semantic web
Smart contracts
solidity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Blockchain has become a pervasive technology in a wide number of sectors like industry, research, and academy. With the emergence of blockchain, new solutions with this technology to existing problems were devised, leading to the introduction of smart contracts. Smart contracts are similar to traditional contracts with the benefits provided by blockchain, such as immutability, privacy, and decentralisation. These contracts are usually defined based on a specific domain, and this domain knowledge can be represented through an ontology. Researches have explored the benefits of using domain ontologies with smart contracts, such as code generation, discovering other contracts in the network, or interaction with other contracts. Notwithstanding, the representation of smart contract languages themselves has not been studied. In this paper, we present an ontology for a well-known smart contract language, Solidity, defining all entities needed to cover the whole language and aligning it to other standardised ontologies such as EthOn, in a way to improve the knowledge of the ontology developed. Furthermore, the ontology has also been validated with already deployed contracts in the Ethereum blockchain. Thus, Solidity will be able to benefit from the advantages provided by ontologies, such as interoperability and the use of semantic web technologies.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3115577