Web3-DAO: An ontology for decentralized autonomous organizations

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are relatively a newly emerging type of online entity related to governance or business models where all their members work together and participate in the decision-making processes affecting the DAO in a decentralized, collective, fair, and democratic manner. In a DAO, members interaction is mediated by software agents running on a blockchain that encode the governance of the specific entity in terms of rules that optimize their business and goals. In this context, most popular DAO software frameworks provide decision-making models aiming to facilitate digital governance and the collaboration among their members intertwining social and economic concerns. However, these models are complex, not interoperable among them and lack a common understanding and shared knowledge concerning DAOs, as well as the computational semantics needed to enable automated validation, simulation or execution. Thus, this paper presents an ontology (Web3-DAO), which can support machine-readable digital governance of DAOs adding semantics to their decision-making models. The proposed ontology captures the domain logic that allows the sharing of updated information and decisions for all the members that interact with a DAO by the interoperability of their own assessment and decision tools. Furthermore, the ontology detects semantic ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions. The Web3-DAO ontology is available in open access at https://github.com/Grasia/semantic-web3-dao.