The role of ontologies in smart contracts: A systematic literature review

Abstract

The aim of this systematic literature review is to provide a comprehensive understanding of how ontologies address current Smart Contract challenges, identify application scenarios, and present tools and technologies associated with their use. This systematic literature review (SLR), following Kitchenham´s methodology, analyses peer-reviewed articles from 2015 to August 2022 from databases such as Scopus, IEEE, Science Direct, Springer Link and ACM. Of the 501 publications identified, 21 are selected for in-depth review based on inclusion, exclusion and quality assessment criteria. The results of this SLR show that ontologies provide solutions to the challenges faced by Smart Contracts mainly at the creation stage. They allow the terms of the contract and the roles of the parties to be defined. Ontologies also enable the development of Smart Contract templates. This facilitates their use by people without technical programming expertise. Despite these potential solutions to the challenges that Smart Contracts face throughout their lifecycle, they lack verification. This increases the vulnerabilities to which Smart Contracts are exposed. Developing validation and verification tools could facilitate using ontologies to create Smart Contracts for different real-world cases.