TWed Talk: Oshani Seneviratne on Ontology Aided Smart Contract Execution for Unexpected Situations

In this talk, I will describe a proposal for implementing an oracle to guide decentralized applications. The primary purpose of the oracle is to strengthen the functionality of the smart contract execution that powers a decentralized application, thus making it amenable to any future changes that may be critical for sustained use. The oracle is supported by an ontology where constraints for transactions are represented by semantic rules, and as such, this ontology-based oracle can help resolve “break glass in case of emergency” type scenarios that require going beyond pre-defined rules in the smart contract. The issue of resolving an unexpected situation that was not explicitly considered in the code can be thought of as dynamic changes to attributes of assets and participants involved in a smart contract, which is equivalent to changing rules for a transaction. We have previously implemented such changes by having users vote on different proposals to change the rules. In this work, we are investigating how such a change can be invoked using an ontology that models contextual information associated with the smart contract. This work was accepted for presentation at the BlockSW workshop at ISWC 2019 http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~consens/blocksw/program.html