Abstract
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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
America’s First Legal DAO Approved in Wyoming, 5 July 2021. https://decrypt.co/75222/americas-first-dao-approved-in-wyoming. Accessed 16 Aug 2021
Buterin, V.: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. https://blockchainlab.com/pdf/Ethereum_white_paper-a_next_generation_smart_contract_and_decentralized_application_platform-vitalik-buterin.pdf. Accessed 16 Aug 2021
Hassan, S.: P2P Models white paper. Decentralized Blockchain-based Organizations for Bootstrapping the Collaborative Economy (2017). https://p2pmodels.eu/wp-content/uploads/whitepaper_p2pmodels.pdf. Accessed 16 Aug 2021
Hassan, S., De Filippi, P.: Decentralized autonomous organization. Internet Policy Rev. 10(2) (2021). https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.2.1556
El Faqir, Y., Arroyo, J., Hassan, S.: An overview of decentralized autonomous organizations on the blockchain. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2020), New York, NY, USA, Article 11, pp. 1–8. Association for Computing Machinery (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3412569.3412579
Liu, L., Zhou, S., Huang, H., Zheng, Z.: From technology to society: an overview of blockchain-based DAO. IEEE Open J. Comput. Soc. 2(1), 204–215. (2021). https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/OJCS.2021.3072661
MolochDAO. https://molochdao.com/. Accessed 16 Aug 2021
Aragon. https://aragon.org/. Accessed 16 Aug 2021
Guarino, N.: Formal Ontology and Information Systems (1998). http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/old/Papers/FOIS98.pdf. Accessed 16 Aug 2021
Norta, A., Othman, A.B., Taveter, K.: Conflict-resolution lifecycles for governed decentralized autonomous organization collaboration. In: Proceedings of the 2015 2nd International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia - EGOSE 2015, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, pp. 244–257. ACM Press. (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2846012.2846052
Kim, H.M., Laskowski, M.: Towards an ontology-driven blockchain design for supply chain provenance. Int. Syst. Account. Finance Manag. (2018). https://doi.org/10.1002/isaf.1424
Kim, H.M., Laskowski, M., Nan, N.: A first step in the co-evolution of blockchain and ontologies: towards engineering an ontology of governance at the blockchain protocol level. arXiv:180102027 (2018)
Silva, D., Guerreiro, S., Sousa, P.: Decentralized enforcement of business process control using blockchain. In: Aveiro, D., Guizzardi, G., Guerreiro, S., Guédria, W. (eds.) EEWC 2018. LNBIP, vol. 334, pp. 69–87. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06097-8_5
Kitchenham, B.: Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering (Version 2.3). EBSE Technical report: EBSE-2007-01. Software Engineering Group, School of Computer Science and Mathematics, Keele University, Staffordshire (2007)
Third, A., Domingue, J.: Linked data indexing of distributed ledgers. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion - WWW 2017 Companion, Perth, Australia, pp. 1431–1436. ACM Press (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3053895
Hoffman, M.R.: Can blockchains and linked data advance taxation. In: Companion of the Web Conference 2018 - WWW 2018, Lyon, France, pp. 1179–1182. ACM Press (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3184558.3191555
Crepaldi, M.: Why blockchains need the law: Secondary rules as the missing piece of blockchain governance. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Montreal, QC, Canada, pp. 189–193. ACM Press (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3322640.3328780
Bindra, L., Lin, C., Stroulia, E., Ardakanian, O.: Decentralized access control for smart buildings using metadata and smart contracts. In: 2019 IEEE/ACM 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems (SEsCPS) , Montreal, QC, Canada, pp. 32–38. IEEE (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/SEsCPS.2019.00013
García, R., Gil, R.: Social media copyright management using semantic web and blockchain. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Information Integration and Web-Based Applications & Services, Munich Germany, pp. 339–343. ACM (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3366030.3366128
Ramachandran, M., Chowdhury, N., Third, A., Domingue, J., Quick, K., Bachler, M.: Towards complete decentralised verification of data with confidentiality: different ways to connect solid pods and blockchain. In: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020, Taipei Taiwan, pp. 645–649. ACM (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3366424.3385759
Johng, H., Kim, D., Park, G., Hong, J.-E., Hill, T., Chung, L.: Enhancing business processes with trustworthiness using blockchain: a goal-oriented approach. In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 61–68 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3341105.3374022
Wang, H., Yuan, Y., Yang, F.: A personal data determination method based on blockchain technology and smart contract. In: Proceedings of the 2020 4th International Conference on Cryptography, Security and Privacy, Nanjing China, pp. 89–94. ACM (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3377644.3377656
Kleinaki, A.-S., Mytis-Gkometh, P., Drosatos, G., Efraimidis, P.S., Kaldoudi, E.: A blockchain-based notarization service for biomedical knowledge retrieval. Comput. Struct. Biotechnol. J. 16, 288–297 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2018.08.002
Chen, Z.: Understanding granular aspects of ontology for blockchain databases. Procedia Comput. Sci. 162, 361–367 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.11.296
Hofman, W.J.: A methodological approach for development and deployment of data sharing in complex organizational supply and logistics networks with blockchain technology. IFAC-Pap. 52, 55–60 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2019.06.010
Roehrs, A., da Costa, C.A., da Rosa Righi, R., da Silva, V.F., Goldim, J.R., Schmidt, D.C.: Analyzing the performance of a blockchain-based personal health record implementation. J. Biomed. Inform. 92, 103140 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2019.103140
Weigand, H., Blums, I., de Kruijff, J.: Shared ledger accounting - implementing the economic exchange pattern. Inf. Syst. 90, 101437 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2019.101437
Zhou, X., Lim, M.Q., Kraft, M.: A Smart Contract-based agent marketplace for the J-Park Simulator - a knowledge graph for the process industry. Comput. Chem. Eng. 139, 106896 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compchemeng.2019.106577
Hofman, D.L.: Legally speaking: smart contracts, archival bonds, and linked data in the blockchain. In: 26th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pp. 1–4 (ICCCN). IEEE (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN.2017.8038515
Choudhury, O., Rudolph, N., Sylla, I., Fairoza, N., Das, A.: Auto-generation of smart contracts from domain-specific ontologies and semantic rules. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (IThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) , Halifax, NS, Canada, pp. 963–970. IEEE (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/Cybermatics_2018.2018.00183
Norta, A.: Self-aware smart contracts with legal relevance. In: 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Rio de Janeiro, pp. 1–8. IEEE (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2018.8489235
Baqa, H., Truong, N.B., Crespi, N., Lee, G.M., le Gall, F.: Semantic smart contracts for blockchain-based services in the internet of things. In: IEEE 18th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA), pp. 1–5 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/NCA.2019.8935016
Li, M., Xia, L., Seneviratne, O.: Leveraging standards based ontological concepts in distributed ledgers: a healthcare smart contract example. In: IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures, Newark, CA, USA, pp. 152–157. IEEE (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/DAPPCON.2019.00029
Laurier, W., Kiehn, J., Polovina, S.: REA2: a unified formalisation of the Resource-Event-Agent ontology. Appl. Ontol. 13, 201–224 (2018). https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-180198
Lee, S.-M., Park, S., Park, Y.B.: Formal specification technique in smart contract verification. In: International Conference on Platform Technology and Service (PlatCon) , Jeju, Korea (South), pp. 1–4. IEEE (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/PlatCon.2019.8669419
Kudumakis, P., Wilmering, T., Sandler, M., Rodriguez-Doncel, V., Boch, L., Delgado, J.: The challenge: from MPEG intellectual property rights ontologies to smart contracts and blockchains [standards in a nutshell]. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 37, 89–95 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2019.2955207
Norta, A.: Creation of smart-contracting collaborations for decentralized autonomous organizations. In: Matulevičius, R., Dumas, M. (eds.) BIR 2015. LNBIP, vol. 229, pp. 3–17. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21915-8_1
Norta, A., Ma, L., Duan, Y., Rull, A., Kõlvart, M., Taveter, K.: eContractual choreography-language properties towards cross-organizational business collaboration. J. Internet Serv. Appl. 6(1), 1–23 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-015-0023-7
Narendra, N.C., Norta, A., Mahunnah, M., Ma, L., Maggi, F.M.: Sound conflict management and resolution for virtual-enterprise collaborations. SOCA 10(3), 233–251 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-015-0183-0
García-Barriocanal, E., Sánchez-Alonso, S., Sicilia, M.-A.: Deploying metadata on blockchain technologies. In: Garoufallou, E., Virkus, S., Siatri, R., Koutsomiha, D. (eds.) Metadata and Semantic Research. CCIS, vol. 755, pp. 38–49. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70863-8_4
de Kruijff, J., Weigand, H.: Understanding the blockchain using enterprise ontology. In: Dubois, E., Pohl, K. (eds.) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. LNCS, vol. 10253, pp. 29–43. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59536-8_3
de Kruijff, J., Weigand, H.: Ontologies for commitment-based smart contracts. In: Panetto, H., et al. (eds.) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2017 Conferences. LNCS, vol. 10574, pp. 383–398. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69459-7_26
Ladleif, J., Weske, M.: A unifying model of legal smart contracts. In: Laender, A.H.F., Pernici, B., Lim, E.-P., de Oliveira, J.P.M. (eds.) ER 2019. LNCS, vol. 11788, pp. 323–337. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33223-5_27
García-Barriocanal, E., Sicilia, M., Sánchez-Alonso, S.: The case for ontologies in expressing decisions in decentralized energy systems. In: Garoufallou, E., Sartori, F., Siatri, R., Zervas, M. (eds.) Metadata and Semantic Research. CCIS, vol. 846, pp. 365–376. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14401-2_35
Risius, M., Spohrer, K.: A blockchain research framework. Bus. Inf. Syst. Eng. 59(6), 385–409 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-017-0506-0
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the project P2P Models (https://p2pmodels.eu) funded by the European Research Council ERC-2017-STG [grant no.: 759207]; and by the project Chain Community funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities [grant no.: RTI2018-096820-A-100].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Valiente, MC., Rozas, D. (2022). Integration of Ontologies with Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Development: A Systematic Literature Review. In: Garoufallou, E., Ovalle-Perandones, MA., Vlachidis, A. (eds) Metadata and Semantic Research. MTSR 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1537. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98876-0_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98876-0_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-98875-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-98876-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)