Modelling Business Agreements in the Multimodal Transportation Domain Through Ontological Smart Contracts

Abstract

The blockchain technology provides integrity and reliability of the information, thus offering a suitable solution to guarantee trustability in a multi-stakeholder scenario that involves actors defining business agreements. The Ride2Rail project investigated the use of the blockchain to record as smart contracts the agreements between different stakeholders defined in a multimodal transportation domain. Modelling an ontology to represent the smart contracts enables the possibility of having a machine-readable and interoperable representation of the agreements. On one hand, the underlying blockchain ensures trust in the execution of the contracts, on the other hand, their ontological representation facilitates the retrieval of information within the ecosystem. The paper describes the development of the Ride2Rail Ontology for Agreements to showcase how the concept of an ontological smart contract, defined in the OASIS ontology, can be applied to a specific domain. The usage of the designed ontology is discussed by describing the modelling as ontological smart contracts of business agreements defined in a ride-sharing scenario.

Editorial of transport data on the web

“…In this direction, semantic technologies can also leverage mapping to transform legacy data models into semantic-based standards and models [3,5,13]. Semantic technologies can also play an important role beyond data interoperability in the transportation domain and leverage service interoperability (as a key enabler of conception such as smart mobility [27]) and many other relevant aspects such as security, privacy and access control [12,22], business agreements [26], booking and ticketing [1], traffic management [28], and travel service recommendation [8,15,16].…”

Blockchain based Multi-signature Smart Contract Electronic Seal Orienting Mobile IoT Terminals

“…Daml contracts can run on centralized ledgers backed by a database, on distributed deployments with BFT(Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus, and on top of traditional blockchains. The Ride2Rail project [38] investigated the use of the blockchain smart contracts as the agreements between different stakeholders in a multimodal transportation domain. The smart contracts was modelled as an ontology to enable the machine-readable and interoperable representation of the agreements.…”