Ontological Smart Contracts in OASIS: Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (Extended Version)
Domenico Cantone, Carmelo Fabio Longo, Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo, Daniele Francesco Santamaria, Corrado Santoro
TL;DR
The paper addresses the need for readable, verifiable, and enforceable agreements in multi-agent systems by integrating ontologies with blockchain technology. It extends OASIS with conditionals and ontological smart contracts (OSCs) that articulate responsibilities and authorizations among agents and can trigger actions when conditions hold. The authors define the OSC/conditional ontology, present a trading-contract example, and describe how SPARQL queries validate contract satisfaction. They propose an architecture leveraging IPFS for scalable data storage and Ethereum for secure, immutable recording, with a workflow that publishes ontologies and queries on IPFS and references them on-chain. Potential future work includes deeper BLONDiE integration, JADE-based code generation, multilingual extensions via WordNet, and a formal set-theoretic representation of OASIS.
Abstract
In this contribution we extend an ontology for modelling agents and their interactions, called Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (in short, OASIS), with conditionals and ontological smart contracts (in short, OSCs). OSCs are ontological representations of smart contracts that allow to establish responsibilities and authorizations among agents and set agreements, whereas conditionals allow one to restrict and limit agent interactions, define activation mechanisms that trigger agent actions, and define constraints and contract terms on OSCs. Conditionals and OSCs, as defined in OASIS, are applied to extend with ontological capabilities digital public ledgers such as the blockchain and smart contracts implemented on it. We will also sketch the architecture of a framework based on the OASIS definition of OSCs that exploits the Ethereum platform and the Interplanetary File System.