One License to Compose Them All - A Deontic Logic Approach to Data Licensing on the Web of Data

In the domain of Linked Open Data a need is emerging for developing automated frameworks able to generate the licensing terms associated to data coming from heterogeneous distributed sources. This paper proposes and evaluates a deontic logic semantics which allows us to define the deontic components of the licenses, i.e., permissions, obligations, and prohibitions, and generate a composite license compliant with the licensing items of the composed different licenses. Some heuristics are proposed to support the data publisher in choosing the licenses composition strategy which better suits her needs w.r.t. the data she is publishing.