The creation of blockchain-based software applications requires today considerable technical knowledge, particularly in software design and programming. This is regarded as a major barrier in adopting this technology in business and making it accessible to a wider audience. As a solution, low-code and no-code approaches have been proposed that require only little or no programming knowledge for creating full-fledged software applications. In this paper we extend a review of academic approaches from the discipline of model-driven engineering as well as industrial low-code and no-code development platforms for blockchains. This includes a content-based, computational analysis of relevant academic papers and the derivation of major topics. In addition, the topics were manually evaluated and refined. Based on these analyses we discuss the spectrum of approaches in this field and derive opportunities for further research.
The distribution of information through web protocols is today based on the client-server model. Recently, decentralized protocols with greater availability appear as well as blockchain-based attestation methods, allowing for proving the existence of information. In combination, these methods promise a secure, decentralized and long-term storage. However, there exist two major problems: (1) the scalability of blockchains limits their storage capacity and (2) various (de)centralized web protocols are in use and could alleviate this problem, but they do not support blockchain-based attestations. In this paper, we extend an approach for blockchain-based attestation with compatibility for multi-protocol storage. Instead of specific protocols or blockchains, the extended approach aims to contribute novel concepts to the discussion on blockchain scalability. It augments the capabilities of existing protocols for applications such as certification or timestamping of digital artifacts. With the use of decentralized protocols such as IPFS, further availability and inherent resilience properties are gained, allowing for applications such as open research repositories and digital registries. We discuss the architecture of the extended approach, a possible implementation in a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain with IPFS and Git, and evaluate the time and cost of attestations.
Although the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is not a W3C standard, it is widely used for semantic web-based projects as well as for innovative rule-based applications. Thereby, it is used to infer new knowledge from a given fact base. Today, SWRL