Blockchains through ontologies: the case study of the Ethereum ERC721 standard in OASIS (Extended Version)
Giampaolo Bella, Domenico Cantone, Cristiano Longo, Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo, Daniele Francesco Santamaria
TL;DR
The paper addresses the need for unambiguous, machine-readable descriptions of blockchain activities by modeling Ethereum smart contracts as agents within the OASIS ontology, with a focused case study on ERC721 NFTs. It represents Ethereum components (blocks, transactions, accounts) and NFT-related contracts as agent behaviors, enabling formal reasoning and SPARQL-based discovery. The main contributions include a comprehensive OASIS-based representation of Ethereum and ERC721 minting/interaction patterns, guided by behavior templates, which supports on-chain/off-chain interoperability. This semantic approach has practical implications for cross-chain integration and automated query-based discovery of contracts and tokens, with future work extending to other token standards and blockchains and toward query-generation tooling.
Abstract
Blockchains are gaining momentum due to the interest of industries and people in \emph{decentralized applications} (Dapps), particularly in those for trading assets through digital certificates secured on blockchain, called tokens. As a consequence, providing a clear unambiguous description of any activities carried out on blockchains has become crucial, and we feel the urgency to achieve that description at least for trading. This paper reports on how to leverage the \emph{Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services} ("\ONT{}") as a general means for the semantic representation of smart contracts stored on blockchain as software agents. Special attention is paid to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), whose management through the ERC721 standard is presented as a case study.