Smart contracts that are smart and can function as legal contracts - A Review of Semantic Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies

TL;DR

This paper reviews existing blockchain and DLT approaches, highlighting semantic limitations, and introduces a new approach aimed at enhancing semantic support for legal and contractual applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of current blockchain technologies and proposes a novel approach to improve semantic capabilities in blockchain and DLT systems.

Findings

Current blockchain technologies lack sufficient semantic support.

The proposed approach addresses semantic limitations in existing DLTs.

Enhanced semantic support can enable more effective legal and contractual applications.

Abstract

Blockchain and Distributed ledger Technologies are increasingly becoming key enablers for vital innovation in financial services, manufacturing, government and other industries. One of the biggest challenges though is the level of support for semantics by most of the Block Chain and Distributed Ledger technologies. This paper reviews and categorises common block chain and DLT approaches and introduces a new approach to Blockchain / DLT promising to resolve the semantic problems inherent in other Blockchain / DLT approaches