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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Hercule
T2 - Representing and Reasoning about Norms as a Foundation for Declarative Contracts over Blockchain
AU - Christie, S.H.
AU - Chopra, A.K.
AU - Singh, M.P.
N1 - ©2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
PY - 2021/7/31
Y1 - 2021/7/31
N2 - Current blockchain approaches for business contracts are based on smart contracts, namely, software programs placed on a blockchain that are automatically executed to realize a contract. However, smart contracts lack flexibility and interfere with the autonomy of the parties concerned. We propose Hercule, an approach for declaratively specifying blockchain applications in a manner that reflects business contracts. Hercule represents a contract via regulatory norms that capture the involved parties' expectations of one another. It computes the states of norms (hence, of contracts) from events in the blockchain. Hercule's novelty and significance lie in that it operationalizes declarative contracts over semistructured databases, the underlying representation for practical blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Specifically, it exploits the map-reduce capabilities of such stores to compute norm states. We demonstrate that our implementation over Hyperledger Fabric can process thousands of events per second, sufficient for many applications. IEEE
AB - Current blockchain approaches for business contracts are based on smart contracts, namely, software programs placed on a blockchain that are automatically executed to realize a contract. However, smart contracts lack flexibility and interfere with the autonomy of the parties concerned. We propose Hercule, an approach for declaratively specifying blockchain applications in a manner that reflects business contracts. Hercule represents a contract via regulatory norms that capture the involved parties' expectations of one another. It computes the states of norms (hence, of contracts) from events in the blockchain. Hercule's novelty and significance lie in that it operationalizes declarative contracts over semistructured databases, the underlying representation for practical blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Specifically, it exploits the map-reduce capabilities of such stores to compute norm states. We demonstrate that our implementation over Hyperledger Fabric can process thousands of events per second, sufficient for many applications. IEEE
KW - Authorization
KW - Blockchain
KW - Contract
KW - Distributed ledger
KW - Document store
KW - Fabrics
KW - History
KW - Law
KW - Regulatory norm
KW - Smart contracts
KW - Internet
KW - Business contracts
KW - Map-reduce
KW - Semistructured database
KW - Software program
U2 - 10.1109/MIC.2021.3080982
DO - 10.1109/MIC.2021.3080982
M3 - Journal article
VL - 25
SP - 67
EP - 75
JO - IEEE Internet Computing
JF - IEEE Internet Computing
SN - 1089-7801
IS - 4
ER -