Evaluation and Comparison Semantics for ODRL
Abstract
We consider the problem of evaluating, and comparing computational policies in the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), which has become the de facto standard for governing the access and usage of digital resources. Although preliminary progress has been made on the formal specification of the language's features, a comprehensive formal semantics of ODRL is still missing. In this paper, we provide a simple and intuitive formal semantics for ODRL that is based on query answering. Our semantics refines previous formalisations, and is aligned with the latest published specification of the language (2.2). Building on our evaluation semantics, and motivated by data sharing scenarios, we also define and study the problem of comparing two policies, detecting equivalent, more restrictive or more permissive policies.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.05139,
title = {Evaluation and Comparison Semantics for ODRL},
author = {Jaime Osvaldo Salas and Paolo Pareti and Semih Yumuşak and Soulmaz Gheisari and Luis-Daniel Ibáñez and George Konstantinidis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.05139},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted as a full paper at the 14th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Graphs (IJCKG 2025). This is the submitted manuscript, the accepted manuscript will be published by Springer Nature