Domenico Cantone

Activity Streams is a data format designed to describe activities. Although its specification is written in natural language, its core vocabulary is formally defined in an OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology. In this work, we propose a set of additional OWL axioms to extend the existing ontology, with the goal of enabling more detailed, precise, and machine-interpretable descriptions of Activity Streams. This enhancement aims to support real-world applications, such as those related to automatic test generation from OWL specifications.

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has grown significantly since the first online shops appeared. Such a growth is quantifiable not only in terms of users and sales but also in complexity: assets, supply chains, shipment modalities and payment methods, auctions, digital negotiations and blockchains are examples of how e-commerce is evolving in the WEB 3.0 era. As consequence of the growth and spread, the need of realizing trustworthy marketplaces, especially when decentralized technologies are involved, came forward. Semantic Web technologies may play a crucial role in this mission as their adoption by the major online marketplaces evidenced. The GoodRelations ontology is a milestone in this context. However, many limitations prevent GoodRelations from addressing the challenges of the incoming releases of the WEB: indeed, intricate and intertwined relationships among the digital commerce stakeholders are outside the expressive power of GoodRelations. Improvements to ontological representation in the e-commerce realm derive from the Theory of Agents. Among the available models, the behavioristic approach pursued by the Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services ( OASIS ) is well suited to addressing emerging challenges, including those posed by Web 3.0. In this contribution, we present an extension of OASIS for the e-commerce domain, aimed at supporting next-generation digital commerce by incorporating features such as supply chain modeling, distributed ledgers, negotiation mechanisms, and auction processes.

Decentralised ledgers are gaining momentum following the interest of industries and people in smart contracts. Major attention is paid to blockchain applications intended for trading assets that exploit digital cryptographic certificates called tokens. Particularly relevant tokens are the non-fungible tokens (NFTs), namely, unique and non-replicable tokens used to represent the cryptographic counterpart of assets ranging from pieces of art through to licenses and certifications. A relevant consequence of the hard-coded nature of blockchains is the hardness of probing, in particular when advanced searchers involving the capabilities of the smart contracts or the assets digitised by NFTs are required. For this purpose, a formal representation for the operational semantics of smart contracts and of tokens has become particularly urgent, especially in economy and finance, where blockchains become increasingly relevant. Hence, we feel the need to tailor Semantic Web technologies to achieve that semantic representation at least for NFTS. This article reports on an ontology that leverages the Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (“OASIS”) towards the semantic representation of smart contracts responsible for managing ERC721-compliant NFTs and running on the Ethereum blockchain. Called Ether-OASIS, the proposed ontology adopts OASIS and tailors its behaviouristic approach to the Ethereum blockchain by conceiving smart contracts as agents running on the blockchain and, consequently, smart contract interactions as agent commitments. Smart contracts are represented in terms of their actions, purposes and tokens that they manage, thus realising a blockchain that is more usable both by users and automated applications. The ontology is evaluated using standard ontological metrics and applied on a case study concerning the minting and transferring of NFTs that digitise batches of wheat.

We present an OWL 2 ontology, called SaintGall, representing the Saint Gall plan, one of the most ancient documents arrived intact to us. The Saint Gall plan describes the ideal model of a Benedictine monastic complex that inspired the design of many European monasteries. The structural, functional, and architectural specification of an ideal Benedectine monastery is modeled by the SaintGall ontology, which allows one to analyse and model the Monastery architectural type. This work started with the purpose of relating Catania’s San Nicolò l’Arena Benedectine Monastery with the abstract notion of Benedectine monastery, in the ambit of an ontological model based on the renovation works carried out by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo and developed by the same authors. The SaintGall ontology opens a research path aiming at comparing different monastic architectures that can be useful in any intervention of refurbishment or design for a monastery.

The way in which Martin Davis conceived the first chapter of his book “Applied nonstandard analysis ” is a brilliant example of information hiding as a guiding principle for the design of widely applicable constructions and methods of proof. We discuss here a common trait that we see between that book and another writing of the year 1977, “Metamathematical extensibility for theorem provers and proof-checkers”, which Martin coauthored with Jacob T. Schwartz. To tie the said part of Martin’s study on nonstandard analysis to proof technology, we undertake a verification, by means of a proof-checker based on set theory, of key results of the non-standard approach to analysis.