A Controlled Natural Language to Support Intent-based Blockchain Selection

Abstract

In the last years, cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular along with their underlying distributed ledger technology, referred to as a Blockchain (BC). Nowadays, a wide variety of BC implementations are available. However, the selection of a suitable implementation for a particular application or use case is complex because it requires a technical understanding of the underlying BC implementation aspects. Therefore, this paper proposes a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) to extends existing BC selection solutions to abstract underlying implementation details. The approach allows the specification abstract high-level policies, referred to as intents, in an English-based language. The approach is inspired by previous approaches from the network management field. Moreover, a state machine-based refinement technique is proposed to refine these intents into low-level BC selection policies. The results of the performance evaluation of the prototype implementation show that the refinement process presents a minimal overhead. In addition, the perceived intuitiveness of the CNL by users was assessed in a survey. The results of the survey suggest that technical and non-technical individuals benefit from an intentbased approach equally.