Legal Contracts to Smart Contracts using Symboleo

Speaker: Daniel Amyot, (University of Ottawa)

to be held on Tuesday, 23rd June 2022, 2.30 pm

HEC Paris, Room S122

Online: Register here and connect to the wright schedule (Abstract hereunder)

Legal contracts specify the terms and conditions that apply to business transactions. Contracts are commonly expressed in natural language and contain many legal requirements that are often ambiguous, incomplete, and possibly inconsistent. Smart contracts are programs intended to partially automate, monitor, and control the execution of legal contracts to ensure compliance with relevant terms and conditions. This talk focuses on the formal specifications of legal contracts that can enable automated analysis and can support the generation of smart contract programs that monitor legal contracts. To that end, the Symboleo textual language was recently proposed, where contracts consist of collections of obligations and powers that define a legal contract’s compliant executions. The concepts underlying Symboleo are inspired from legal ontologies with specialized contract concepts, with semantics described in terms of logical axioms on statecharts that describe the lifetimes of contracts, obligations, powers, and other concepts. An encoding of Symboleo specifications in the nuXmv language, including a library of trusted modules capturing basic Symboleo concepts, enables the formal verification of properties of a contract, expressed in temporal logic (i.e., in LTL or CTL). An IDE with code generation capabilities also enables the transformation of Symboleo specifications to executable smart contracts for the Hyperledger Fabric platform, in JavaScript. An example from a food supply chain will be used to illustrate the concepts, and future work on converting natural language contracts to Symboleo specifications and on consideration for quality aspects during code generation will be discussed.

You can find more information about the seminar series, including the full program for 2022 and relevant information to connect online, on this website: here.