Semantic-Driven Enforcement of Rights Delegation Policies via the Combination of Rules and Ontologies

We show that the semantic formal model for Open Digital Right Language (ODRL)-based rights delegation policies can be enforced and expressed as a combination of ontologies and rules, e.g., Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Based on ODRL’s expressions and data dictionary, a rights delegation ontology is proposed in this study. Furthermore, we express the rights delegation policy as a set of ontology statements, rules, and facts for usage and transfer rights delegation. When verifying ODRL formal semantics, our SWRL approach is superior to the generic restricted First Order Logic (FOL) model because we have an understandable formal semantics of policies for automatic machine processing and a higher expressive power for policy compliance checking. On the other hand, the rights delegation semantics shown as a generic full FOL might have a higher complexity of license verification, which results in a policy compliance checking that is possibly undecidable. A real usage rights delegation scenario for digital content is demonstrated in order to justify the feasibility of our formal semantic model for digital rights delegation. We hope this study will shed some light on future sensitive information usage and delegation rights controlled from a privacy protection perspective.