User Manual for the Generic Insurance Framework¶
Terminology¶
Below, you will find a glossary of the technical terms used in this document.
- Actor.
- Any participant of the DIP that uses the ecosystem to perform an activity on it (e.g., a product, a product owner, an oracle owner, the instance operator, etc.).
- Application.
- Data applied by a customer requesting an insurance policy. An application is the predecessor of a policy. Not to be confused with software application; in our context we avoid the term “application” in this sense.
- Claim.
- Data related to an insurance claim, which requires approval.
- Decentralized Insurance Platform (DIP).
- An ecosystem supported by the DIP Foundation that unites product builders, risk pool keepers, resellers, oracle providers, claim adjusters, relayers, and underwriters.
- Decentralized Insurance Protocol (DIP Protocol).
- A set of standards, rules, templates and definitions which define the interaction of participants in the ecosystem.
- Generic Insurance Framework (GIF).
- A combined codebase, which includes smart contracts and utility services (core smart contracts and microservices) provided by the DIP Foundation and partners. The codebase can be extended by product-specific smart contracts and microservices created by product builders. Using this framework, product builders can develop full-featured DApps.
GIF instance. A deployed set of core smart contracts, operated by an instance operator, in most cases together with an appropriate set of utility services. A GIF instance is essentially an “Insurance as a Service (IaaS)”.
Instance operator. An Ethereum account which operates an instance of the GIF. An instance operator can be a decentralized organization (DAO) or a single account owned by some legal entity.
- Metadata.
- A shared object between all the objects of a particular policy flow.
- Oracle.
- A service used to provide information to smart contracts from external resources, confirm certain events, and deliver particular data to a product.
- Oracle owner.
- An Ethereum account registered on the DIP with a set of permissions for creating oracles and oracle types and performing operations on them.
- Oracle type.
- A type of request to an oracle containing attributes that describe a request and respond to it. Oracles join an oracle type.
- Payout.
- Data related to the expected and actual payout for a claim.
- Policy.
- Technical representation of the legal agreement between a policy buyer and a carrier.
- Policy flow.
- A core smart contract that represents a workflow of insurance policy life cycle, involving such steps as application underwriting, risk assessment, claim review, and payouts.
- Policy token.
- A ERC1521 token (extension of a ERC 721 NFT Token), which represents a policy as a set of particular fields.
- Product.
- A registered smart contract with permissions to create and manage policy flows.
- Product owner.
- An Ethereum account registered on the GIF with a set of permissions allowing to create and manage product contracts and oracle types.