[Odrl-version2] ONIX Licensing Terms and ODRL

[David Martin]

Renato,

At the end of last week Francis and I did a round-up of points that we 
think need to be resolved in order for us to aim for interoperability 
between ONIX for Licensing Terms (OLT) and ODRL in those areas where the 
domain of OLT overlaps with that of ODRL.

We want to avoid any confusion between issues relating to ACAP (in which 
I am not personally involved) and those relating to OLT (on which 
Francis and I work together).  Also, we want to clarify that we are 
considering an OLT profile, not an ONIX-PL profile.  ONIX-PL is a first 
application of OLT, which happens to be much more advanced than others, 
but also happens to be dealing with a domain which doesn't comfortably 
overlap with ODRL, because of its inherent ambiguities and because the 
aim is primarily to enable structured information to be delivered to 
people (library staff and users) rather than to be used for machine 
decision.

We would therefore provisionally limit the OLT domain which we would 
like to be able to express in ODRL to those applications in which 
Permissions and Prohibitions are unambiguous.

In all currently planned OLT applications, the basic "building block" is 
what we refer to as a "Usage" entity, which for the purposes of mapping 
to ODRL is either a single Permission or a single Prohibition, in either 
case referring to a single Action.  In some contexts there may be 
definite reasons for treating a single instance as a separate entity; in 
other contexts they will be packaged into a complete set of Usage Terms.

We have been looking, therefore, at what we think is needed in the ODRL 
Core Model to enable us to express each OLT Usage as a single ODRL 
Policy (although it probably wouldn't matter if there were cases where a 
single OLT Usage had to be expressed as two or more ODRL Policies).

At this point we have found only three issues, all of which have already 
come up one way or another in recent emails:

1.  We need to be able to refer in an ODRL Policy to Assets other than 
the Asset used or Assets related to Duties, and to specify their role or 
function in relation to the Action.  You have indicated that this will 
be on the agenda for your WG call tomorrow.

2.  We identified the 'relax' attribute on a Duty as inadequate to 
express the range of variations that might arise in practice.  You 
proposed a solution, and again you have said that it will be on the WG 
agenda.

3.  Finally, it follows from what I have said above that we need to be 
able to map an OLT Usage into an ODRL Policy which carries only a 
Prohibition. Picking up on your latest exchange with Francis, we would 
like you to consider making this admissible within the generic Core 
Model; but failing that, it would have to be part of an OLT Profile.

We are continuing to work on OLT developments related to applications 
other than ONIX-PL, and looking at how they relate to ODRL, and it is 
possible that something else may come up within the timescale for 
publication of ODRL Version 2; but we haven't spotted anything else so 
far...

Best wishes,

David
--
David Martin
david at polecat.dircon.co.uk

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