An OWL Copyright Ontology for Semantic Digital Rights Management

Digitalisation and the Internet have caused a content reproduction and distribution revolution with clear implications for copyright management. There are many Digital Rights Management (DRM) efforts that facilitate copyright management in closed domains but they find great difficulties when they are forced to interoperate in an open domain like the World Wide Web. In order to facilitate interoperation and automation, DRM systems can be enriched with domain formalisations like the Copyright Ontology. This ontology is implemented using the Description Logic variant of the Web Ontology Language (OWL-DL). This approach facilitates the implementation of efficient usages against licenses checking, which is reduced to description logics classification.