An interoperable framework for IPR using web ontologies

In order to improve the management of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Internet, there is the need for a common language for IPR representation. This language is aimed to help building a reliable Web where IPR can be managed in an open, global and adaptable form, so people can share, sell, buy, etc. content subject to IPR, depending on their needs. We are following a semantic approach to this problem, based on semantic web ontologies, that seems more appropriate than a syntactic one, e.g. based on XML. IPROnto, the IPR ontology we have developed, puts this approach into practice. IPROnto models the IPR core concepts for content, intellectual property rights and the basic kinds of actions that operate on intellectual property and allows developing licenses. IPROnto enables semantics-aware IPR applications that benefit from semantic queries, in contrast to the difficulties that emerge from the use of syntactic queries when the information space is as complicated as in the IPR field. Moreover, specialised reasoners can be used for license checking and retrieval. Finally, all these advantages have been propagated to the main syntactic approaches to IPR management (MPEG-21 and ODRL). We have applied XML Schema to OWL and XML to RDF tools in order to facilitate mapping these initiatives to IPROnto. Once mapped, syntactic initiatives can also benefit from the semantic approach provided by Web ontologies. For example, IPROnto integrates ODRL and MPEG-21 initiatives, which allows to change the Rights Data Dictionary when it is necessary, i.e. to make the rights expression language independent from the data dictionary.