Integrating Blockchain Smart Contracts and Ontology to Ensure Transparency and Integrity in Administration

This paper presents an ontology-driven administrative monitoring system that integrates blockchain smart contracts to ensure transparency, accountability, and integrity in organizational processes. This tracks resources and manages administrative workflows in an open and decentralised manner, addressing long-standing governance challenges such as opacity and unaccountability. Many important administrative processes involve the movement of resources from one point to another; these resources and processes can be modelled similarly to the movement of goods in a supply chain. Motivated by the need to improve institutional governance, particularly in contexts where individual actions often undermine fairness, this study combines ontology and blockchain to formalize administrative processes and enhance traceability. A pre-created ontology from the author’s previous work, developed for postgraduate administration at the University of Ibadan, was adopted. The ontology defines classes and activities which were translated into blockchain entities and smart contracts, implemented in Solidity, and deployed on the Ethereum test network. Test cases derived from ontology competency questions validate the functional correctness of the smart contracts. The results confirm that administrative activities can be monitored transparently and immutably, providing a foundation for broader applications in public administration, education, and corporate governance.