Making it Real: Ontology, Commitments and Smart Contracts
Ontologies provide the promise of being able to formally model the ‘real’, while knowledge graphs are by their nature data, not real things. Meanwhile distributed ledger technologies such as smart contracts provide a means to formally link data itself back to the real. One kind of real thing is the commitment, a social construct that forms the basis for all types of agreements and transactions. In this presentation we explore a simple foundational ontology for contracts and commitments, considering how this needs to be linked to code in a smart contracts ecosystem, to close the loop between data and reality, using examples from supply chain management. This has onward opportunities in the areas of trade finance and insurance, among others.
Mike Bennett
Mike Bennett helps firms manage their information assets using formal ontologies for data governance, integration and knowledge graph development. Coming from a background of industrial software, he has over 20 years of financial industry experience and is the originator of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), a standard repository for financial industry concepts and definitions from the EDM Council and the Object Management Group (OMG). Mike delivers services in semantics strategy and ontology development and is the Technical Director of the OMG, with oversight of the technology adoption process.