Symboleo: Towards a Specification Language for Legal Contracts

Sharifi, Sepehr; Parvizimosaed, Alireza; Amyot, Daniel; Logrippo, Luigi; Mylopoulos, John

doi:10.1109/re48521.2020.00049

Cited by 35 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Nevertheless, SPESC does not address many aspects of contracts, such as obligation states, categories of rights and obligations, etc., but instead focuses on modelling legal relations (legal positions). In [21], researchers propose a formal specification language (Symboleo) reflecting obligations and powers, using domain concepts and axioms. Symboleo specifications include rights and obligations that can be monitored on a run-time basis.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Formal Specification Smart-Contract Language for Legally Binding Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

et al. 2021

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Blockchain-and smart-contract technology enhance the effectiveness and automation of business processes. The rising interest in the development of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) shows that blockchain technology has the potential to reform business and society. A DAO is an organization wherein business rules are encoded in smart-contract programs that are executed when specified rules are met. The contractual-and business semantics are sine qua non for drafting a legally-binding smart contract in DAO collaborations. Several smart-contract languages (SCLs) exist, such as SPESC, or Symboleo to specify a legally-binding contract. However, their primary focus is on designing and developing smart contracts with the cooperation of IT-and non-IT users. Therefore, this paper fills a gap in the state of the art by specifying a smart-legal-contract markup language (SLCML) for legal-and business constructs to draft a legally-binding DAO. To achieve the paper objective, we first present a formal SCL ontology to describe the legal-and business semantics of a DAO. Secondly, we translate the SCL ontology into SLCML, for which we present the XML schema definition. We demonstrate and evaluate our SLCML language through the specification of a real life-inspired Sale-of-Goods contract. Finally, the SLCML use-case code is translated into Solidity to demonstrate its feasibility for blockchain platform implementations.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We discover that several workarounds, for example, SPECS [20], Symboleo [21], SmaCoNat [22], have been published in the scientific literature to develop legally-binding SCLs. The existing research is limited to specify smart legal contracts only for simple business contracts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Formal Specification Smart-Contract Language for Legally Binding Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

et al. 2021

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“…This paper presents eflint, a domain-specific language (DSL) for formalizing norms as executable specifications. Compared to existing languages, eflint is novel in several respects and is most similar to languages based on the event calculus such as Symboleo [28] and InstAL [20]. A significant body of work exists concerning the formalization, analysis and enforcement of specific kinds of norms [14] such as policies for access control [29], network policies [1] (e.g.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A significant body of work exists concerning the formalization, analysis and enforcement of specific kinds of norms [14] such as policies for access control [29], network policies [1] (e.g. firewall configurations) and contracts [27,28]. Instead, eflint is designed for describing a wide variety of normative sources such as laws, regulations, policies and contracts.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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eFLINT: a domain-specific language for executable norm specifications

Binsbergen

Liu

Doesburg

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences

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Software systems that share potentially sensitive data are subjected to laws, regulations, policies and/or contracts. The monitoring, control and enforcement processes applied to these systems are currently to a large extent manual, which we rather automate by embedding the processes as dedicated and adaptable software services in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness. This approach requires such regulatory services to be closely aligned with a formal description of the relevant norms.This paper presents eflint, a domain-specific language developed for formalizing norms. The theoretical foundations of the language are found in transition systems and in Hohfeld's framework of legal fundamental conceptions. The language can be used to formalize norms from a large variety of sources. The resulting specifications are executable and support several forms of reasoning such as automatic case assessment, manual exploration and simulation. Moreover, the specifications can be used to develop regulatory services for several types of monitoring, control and enforcement. The language is evaluated through a case study formalizing articles 6(1)(a) and 16 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A prototype implementation of eflint is discussed and is available online.

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