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Blockchains Through Ontologies: The Case Study of the Ethereum ERC721 Standard in oasis

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Intelligent Distributed Computing XIV (IDC 2021)

Abstract

Blockchains are gaining momentum due to the interest of industries and people in 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 Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (“OASIS”) 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.

This work has been supported by the ONTOCHAIN NGI European project grant agreement no. 957338. We are thankful to the ONTOCHAIN Consortium who mentored and assisted the research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1221742/nft-market-capitalization-worldwide/ (last access: 08/07/2021).

  2. 2.

    https://ethereum.org/it/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-721/.

  3. 3.

    The ontology is reachable at http://www.dmi.unict.it/oasis.owl.

  4. 4.

    The ontology is reachable at https://www.dmi.unict.it/santamaria/projects/oasis/sources/ether-oasis.owl.

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Correspondence to Daniele Francesco Santamaria .

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Bella, G., Cantone, D., Longo, C., Nicolosi Asmundo, M., Santamaria, D.F. (2022). Blockchains Through Ontologies: The Case Study of the Ethereum ERC721 Standard in oasis. In: Camacho, D., Rosaci, D., Sarné, G.M.L., Versaci, M. (eds) Intelligent Distributed Computing XIV. IDC 2021. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1026. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96627-0_23

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