A Controlled Natural Language to Support Intent-based Blockchain Selection

Abstract

In the last years, cryptocurrencies have becomeincreasingly popular along with their underlying distributedledger 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 particularapplication or use case is complex because it requires technicalunderstanding of the underlying BC implementation aspects.Therefore, this paper proposes a Controlled Natural Language(CNL) to extends existing BC selection solutions to abstractunderlying implementation details. The approach allows thespecification abstract high-level policies, referred to as intents, inan English-based language. The approach is inspired by previousapproaches from the network management field. Moreover, astate machine-based refinement technique is proposed to refinethese intents into low-level BC selection policies. The resultsof the performance evaluation of the prototype implementationshow that the refinement process presents a minimal overhead.In addition, the perceived intuitiveness of the CNL by userswas assessed in a survey. The results of the survey suggest thattechnical and non-technical individuals benefit from an intent-based approach equally