GCA

Work Description:
In the context of EAI, ensuring that agreements between parties involved in the integration process are honoured and that potential violations are detected and flagged is critical. These agreements between the parties can be, among other types, contracts signed between the owner of the integration process and the owners of the data sources accessed by the tasks (applications, generally). They can also be signed agreements between the process owner and the recipients of the data produced by the process. We consider these legal (traditional) contracts between parties in the real world and, therefore, not amenable to automated monitoring. Moreover, the parties must trust each other and use institutions that mediate between them. The quality of the integration process depends on the quality of the service delivered by the participating applications. Smart contracts are an emerging technology that can be used to automate the supervision of agreements. Intuitively, a smart contract is an executable piece of code deployed to mediate and regulate contractual interactions. We argue that a new DSL, named Jabuti, for writing smart contracts should automate the execution of the clauses included in EAI agreements. The smart contract will be responsible for notifying the participants of violations when they take place and for collecting control data. We propose a contract verification tool that can be used regardless of platform, identify possible semantic errors and use a verification framework that does not allow semantic errors to occur.