Integration of ontologies with decentralized autonomous organizations development: A systematic literature review

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the integration of ontologies into the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) development process. The review extracted data from 34 primary studies dealing with ontologies in the blockchain domain. DAO has become a key concept for the development of blockchain-based decentralized software systems. DAOs are seen as a positive alternative for organizations interested in the adoption of decentralized, reliable and transparent governance, as well as attracting the interest of academic research. However, there is no common understanding or generally accepted formal definition of a DAO, and the guidelines that provide support for the adoption and development of DAOs are limited to a few key references that lack the computational semantics needed to enable their automated validation, simulation or execution. Thus, the objective of this paper is to provide an unbiased and up-to-date review related to the integration of ontologies within DAOs which helps to identify new research opportunities and take advantage of this integration from a blockchain-based decentralized perspective

A Formal Specification Smart-Contract Language for Legally Binding Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Blockchain- and smart-contract technology enhance the effectiveness and automation of business processes. The rising interest in the development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) shows that blockchain technology has the potential to reform business and society. A DAO is an organization wherein business rules are encoded in smart-contract programs that are executed when specified rules are met. The contractual- and business semantics are sine qua non for drafting a legally-binding smart contract in DAO collaborations. Several smart-contract languages (SCLs) exist, such as SPESC, or Symboleo to specify a legally-binding contract. However, their primary focus is on designing and developing smart contracts with the cooperation of IT- and non-IT users. Therefore, this paper fills a gap in the state of the art by specifying a smart-legal-contract markup language (SLCML) for legal- and business constructs to draft a legally-binding DAO. To achieve the paper objective, we first present a formal SCL ontology to describe the legal- and business semantics of a DAO. Secondly, we translate the SCL ontology into SLCML, for which we present the XML schema definition. We demonstrate and evaluate our SLCML language through the specification of a real life-inspired Sale-of-Goods contract. Finally, the SLCML use-case code is translated into Solidity to demonstrate its feasibility for blockchain platform implementations