Semantic Representation as a Key Enabler for Blockchain-Based Commerce

Decentralized applications (in short, DApps) built on blockchains are disrupting the digital commerce foundations by pursuing new business models based on trustless, decentralized transactions, where intermediaries and central authorities are discarded. One of those emerging means are the digital tokens, certificates emitted and exchanged on the blockchain to provide digital representations of assets, which grant to the owners specific rights that are publicly verifiable by smart automatic contractual types of arrangement called smart contracts. Due to the increasing complexity of commercial mechanisms, a clear unambiguous description of commercial participants and of their in and out of blockchain activities, on top of which trustworthy and affordable ecosystems are constructed, is demanded. To face the challenges that digital commerce nowadays poses on realizing such ecosystems, the ONTOCHAIN consortium has funded a third-party research and development project named POC4COMMERCE. In this paper, we discuss the advancements of the project, giving insights into the approach and the best practices adopted by the developing team, to build a suite of ontologies modelling representative entities of the digital commerce ecosystem such as commercial participants and assets traded leveraging the Ethereum blockchain.