This document includes a set of use cases and requirements, compiled by the Permissions & Obligations Expression (POE) working group, that motivate the expression of statements about digital content usage. All use cases provide realistic examples describing how people and organisations may (or want to be able to) specify statements about digital content usage. The requirements derived from these use cases will be used to guide the development of the POE WG recommendation deliverables for the Information Model, Vocabulary and Encodings.
This first public working draft of sets out the use cases that will be used to extend the ODRL model that is the starting point for the Working Group. Work is already under way to derive requirements and further use cases are welcome.
This document is organized as follows:
Víctor Rodríguez on behalf of W3C Linked Data For Language Technology Community Group
Language resources (lexicons, dictionaries, machine translation, etc.) are collected in repositories. Publishers would like to express what is permitted and what it is not.
Language resources are highly valuable resources now being massively translated to Linked Data. See the diagram here: Linguistic Linked Data Cloud. Different Language Resource Catalogs exist, like the one of CLARIN, or the one of META-SHARE, LRMAP, Linghub, etc. These resources need to be browsed and queried, and the permissions information must be in a machine-readable form in order to facilitate search-by-permission and in order to allow the automated processing of permission expressions.
Víctor Rodríguez and Nandana Mihindukulasooriya (UPM) on behalf of the ODRL Linked Data profile editors.
A publisher of Linked Data (or in general a RDF dataset) wants to selectively make available parts (e.g. named graphs) of a dataset. Availability depend on ODRL policies, the context and the ODRL Request and ODRL Ticket. For example, given a dataset, one might want to serve it under the following conditions: "Anybody can access named graph ex:graph1, but can only access ex:graph2 during 2016. Individual triples in ex:graph3 can be accessed at the price of 1 eur cent."
Phil Archer & Keith Jeffery on behalf of the VRE4EIC Project
Researchers are strongly encouraged (and now routinely required) to publish data supporting their scholarly published papers. Irrespective of the terms under which the paper is published (although usually open access), the data is generally expected to be made freely and openly available. However, this may happen after an embargo period. The purpose of the embargo period is to allow the researcher or research team creating the dataset to have a publication based on it published before colleagues can access the dataset and generate their own publications.
Serena Villata (joint work with Guido Governatori) in the context of the MIREL Project
Technical documents describe how to handle and what are the functionalities of a certain product or process. They are intended to provide information about what can/cannot be done with the product or within a certain process. Given the huge dimension of this kind of legal texts and their diffusion in the companies, the advantages of returning a machine-readable representation of such texts would allow to have in this representation a kind of summary of the main constraints expressed in the documents, with invaluable time saving for every person that is expected to read the whole document before obtaining this information. A specific usage of such a kind of texts is that of manually extracting the set of obliged/prohibited/permitted actions in order to check whether certain business processes are compliant with the legal text they should refer to.
Mo McRoberts, BBC
The Research & Education Space platform, developed jointly by the BBC and partners, indexes Linked Open Data describing media that is available both to the public, and specifically for those in formal education, primarily in the UK. Even within this latter group, there are a range of different licensing schemes and access mechanisms which are not mutually-exclusive. For queries against the index to return appropriate results for a user, we must track which schemes they (or their institution) is a member of and filter based upon these, which therefore translates into a requirement for the metadata being indexed to include information identifying which are applicable (we term these "audience URIs"). Note that this is not an access-control mechanism (this should be implemented and enforced at the media location), rather a means of ensuring that an optimal user experience is delivered.
Phil Archer for the Big Data Europe Project
OpenPHACTS integrates pharmacological data from a wide range of sources and provides an API through which different identifiers for the same thing can be reconciled, reducing barriers to drug discovery in industry, academia and for small businesses. Some data is open but not all. It may come with a variation of a Creative Commons License; some data is visible to all users, some to members, some only to the original data owner.
Rather than attempt to make assertions about what an end user can or cannot do with the data available through its API, OpenPHACTS is careful to simply make clear to its users where data came from and under what terms. It is then up to the end user to assess whether their intended use is, or is not, compliant with those terms.
Stuart Myles
In the news industry, rights holders and editors need to establish the permissions and restrictions associated with content.
Phil Archer
The European Data Portal (EDP) harvests and republishes metadata from across Europe. It therefore has to handle a wide variety of inputs, including a variety of licenses attached to datasets (and datasets with no license attached). In order to manage this, the EDP has examined each of the most commonly found licenses and derived a set of atomic permissions and obligations expressed in those licenses with the intention that reusers can assess whether or not a particular combination of datasets is permissible and, if so, under what conditions. Their work itself is available on the European Data Portal as Licence Assistant: European Data Portal Licence Compatibility Matrix.
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
A bundled data product, which is sometimes called a 'base product', brings together a set of permissions that can be separately bought into a policy [or package] that is sold for a single price - or provided for free. It is important that the pricing is set at the aggregate level.
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
Sometimes things are paid for on a per-usage basis. For instance a SaaS product might charge per account (or per seat), or a definition in legal treatise might be charged for every time it is printed or included in a PDF.
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
There are some common obligations that must be transmitted if you are acting as an intermediary between the data owner and the data user. Often the owner and the user must sign a contract, the user must acknowledge the copyright of the owner, and the user must acknowledge some other documentation (like a 'Restriction On Distribution Statement').
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
Data sets are often combined (aggregation) and analysed to generate new data sets (derivation). Big data analytics generates extended workflows of such operations. What policies control each step of the process? For example, a synthetic instrument might be generated by following a simple rule: (equity price on NYSE - equity opening price on NYSE) * equity weighting on MSCI Technology Index)
Let's say we know the three policies that control equity prices on the New York Stock Exchange, their opening prices, and their index weighting. Then what is the policy that controls the resulting synthetic instrument?
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
Assigners are often corporate entities. They may want to restrict the right to exercise the actions they 'own' to particular groups within their own organisation, or even to an individual. This doesn't feel like an rights assignment (as no rights are being assigned?) but a delegation.
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
Extended relations are an experimental feature of ODRL 2.1. In many cases, they would be necessary for commercial purposes. For example, it might be the case that on the 15th of every month the user must report usage by providing a list of either Access IDs OR Physical IDs. Extended relations would be a way of enabling this.
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
Permissions often vary depending on whether the data is used in real-time (expensive and restrictive) or after a specified delay (cheaper and less restrictive).
Ben Whittam Smith on behalf of Thomson Reuters
Access to historical data is often specified by the access period (how long can you go back in history) and access interval (how often can you sample the history). So a permission might be for access to 7 years of historical data but only on a monthly basis.
James Birmingham on behalf of Digital Catapult
In order to manage a common offer which is applied to many assets, a one-to-many relationship is more preferable than a one-to-one. If the offer can target a set of assets, it must also be able to state that what is offered is n items from the set rather than the whole set.
Renato Iannella
A common use case is for a general policy statement to be asserted. This is simply a party stating what policy terms they believe they have. Either an assignee can assert what terms they have over an asset and/or an assigner can assert what terms they have over an asset. An assertion does not grant any of the statements. A policy assertion may state that a party is a general rights holder or other roles.
Michael Steidl
Sometimes it's required to be able to constrain the applicability of policies according to a relative point in time, e.g.:
Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel
META-SHARE is an open and secure network of repositories for sharing and exchanging language data, tools, and related web services. As of July 2016, it accounted more than 2700 resources. These resources are described with small pieces of metadata according to their schema.
While maintainers of META-SHARE's 32 repositories can edit simple metadata records, they are usually not skilled enough to edit ODRL expressions. Hence they would like to be able to:
Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel
Depending on the use case, it's often necessary to specify constraints on properties of different kinds of entities (e.g., assets, parties or any other external entities). The exact subject for which those constraints must hold is currently not encodable in ODRL, but has to be inferred from the textual semantics of each of ODRL's 25 constraint terms; which not only leads to ambiguities in terms of interpreted semantics, but might also prove to be not capable of fully covering new usages of ODRL.
Serena Villata (joint work with Guido Governatori) in the context of the MIREL Project
Technical documents describe how to handle and what are the functionalities of a certain product or process (e.g., telecommunication codes). They are intended to provide information about what can/cannot be done with the product or within a certain process. Given the huge dimension of this kind of legal texts and their diffusion in the companies, the advantages of returning a machine-readable representation of such texts would allow to have in this representation a kind of summary of the main constraints expressed in the documents, with invaluable time saving for every person that is expected to read the whole document before obtaining this information. A specific usage of such a kind of texts is that of manually extracting the set of obliged/prohibited/permitted actions in order to check whether certain business processes are compliant with the legal text they should refer to. Moreover, issues related to the merging of updated versions of the documents, with amendments with respect to the policies and duties expressed in the former versions.
Duplicate of POE.UC.04
Brian Ulicny
Many data providers require that if a record or element of the data is deleted in the source, it must be deleted in any copy and/or aggregation of that data. For example, arrest records must be expunged in public datasets if they are expunged by a court. Twitter requires that deleted tweets not be used in datasets, and so on.
Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale (LIM), Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano
IEEE 1599 is an international XML-based standard that aims to comprehensively describe music content by supporting the representation of heterogeneous music aspects within a single XML document. Moreover, IEEE 1599 lets spatio-temporal relationships emerge among such materials, thanks to the identification of music events inside a common data structure known as the spine: in this way, events can be described in different layers (e.g., a chord’s graphical aspect and its audio performance), as well as multiple times within a single layer (e.g., different music performances of the same events). Consequently, the IEEE 1599 multilayer environment presents two complementary synchronization modes: inter-layer and intra-layer synchronization. Coupling these two categories of synchronization makes it possible to design and implement frameworks that allow new kinds of interaction with media contents and novel music-experience models, as shown in the Music Box area of the EMIPIU web framework (see URL above). Recognizing music events and their synchronization can be seen as an additional intellectual achievement that on one side does not affect the already existing IP rights on media contents, but on the other side requires adequate protection. Consequently, it is desirable to consider a new permission which allows the producer to synchronize different media contents with respect to the other possibly existing permissions, restrictions and duties associated with media contents.
Dianne Kennedy, Idealliance
In the Magazine Industry, magazine media companies need the ability to communicate the legal terms of usage permissions (known as licensing terms) that are associated with content (article text and rich media). Specifically:
Potential duplicate of POE.UC.07
Antoine Isaac, Riccardo Albertoni
Example from the W3C Working Group Data on the Web Best Practices (https://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/), more specifically for the Data Quality Vocabulary (https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dqv/). This example specifies that the serviceProvider grants the permission to access the dataset and commits to serve the data with a certain quality, more concretely, 99% availability of a SPARQL endpoint associated with the dataset. This is expressed as a duty on the service provider with a constraint that is defined using a DQV metric (:sparqlEndpointUptime) that has to be greater than a certain value (99). The odrl:assignee is the Party is the recipient of the policy statement and the odrl:assigner is the Party is the issuer of the policy statement. For discussion about this example see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-odrl/2016Feb/0000.html
The expression of constraints in ODRL seems quite unfit with expressing general constraints on values in RDF graphs, as we would require here. However, ODRL can be easily extended, and is schedule to undergo refinement in the context of the W3C Permissions & Obligations Expression Working Group. In the future DQV implementers should investigate whether a general constraint expression language like the coming SHACL provides a more appropriate mechanism to be used on top of ODRL permissions and duties.
Antoine Isaac, Riccardo Albertoni
Data providers who are also the rights holders of the digital objects in question may want to allow reuse of their digital objects for educational purpose only.
Julie Morris on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.) is an online library cooperative that seeks to catalog the world’s library records in order to improve awareness of what books and other resources (electronic and print) are available in participating libraries globally. A better method for collecting information describing copyright ownership of and permissions on a given resource, and a standard set of rights data, including standard terms and clear definitions of those terms, is needed in order to provide consistent and accurate information regarding the permissions associated with the resources catalogued in libraries worldwide, including those currently in the WorldCat database and those that are incoming. Currently, rights and permissions information on catalogued materials is often inconsistent, inaccurate and/or incomplete.
Julie Morris on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
Currently, rights and permissions data is captured primarily at the book product level (typically using ONIX). Publishers large and small would like to take advantage of new content licensing opportunities for chapters, chunks, or other portions of the whole work (such as SharedBook) but often do not have sufficient permissions information to do so. A simple system for assigning permissions to chunks of content is needed, including a standard rights language used to collect permissions information from authors and publishers, along with a standard method for communicating permissions data that is machine-readable and travels with the content (in the EPUB or other electronic file, such as in the metadata embedded in an image file).
Julie Morris on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
A number of opportunities exist for book publishers to sell works through subscription services, such as Scribd, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, and Playster, but they are unable to take advantage of these services because a consistent method for collecting and communicating subscription rights data has not been adopted within the industry. Subscription information can now be included in ONIX records (the primary book product metadata standard) but not all service providers are capable of accepting ONIX data.
Julie Morris on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
Most large book publishers have developed their own internal databases/systems for managing rights and permissions information, but in many cases these systems have become out of date and insufficient for tracking the kinds of granular rights data needed to take advantage of new and forthcoming opportunities for content licensing. In addition, in many cases rights departments at large publishing houses are segmented from acquisitions and editorial departments, deepening the divide between the rights information collected for new works and that which is needed—digital assets are not always defined from the point of acquisition. A standard set of discrete permissions data including a variety of digital rights would provide an efficient system for publishers to begin collecting this information. Currently a large amount of revenue is left on the table because of insufficient knowledge of rights held, and lack of an efficient system for collecting and communicating permissions data that incorporates the breadth of licensing models available. A standardized model and vocabulary for expressing permissions and obligations information would facilitate both the management of content licensed from others and the monetization of content licensed to others.
To be clear, this use case does not envision creating a standard for publishers to use as the sole basis for their internal databases/systems; rather, it envisions a standard way of ingesting and outputting rights and permissions information, with which publishers’ internal databases should interoperate.
Julie Morris on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
A university press holds a large database of work, including books, journals, and other electronic resources, and regularly sub-licenses foreign and translations rights to international clients. The database is housed in an internal system but insufficient rights information exists due in part to the lack of a clear system for collecting and managing rights and permissions information. The UP needs a standard system for labeling rights held and rights sold/purchased in order to efficiently execute rights deals internationally. Consistency of contractual language terminology and meaning among international trading partners is key: rights language across internal database and clients’ database is often misaligned. Additionally, many transactions are still done or initiated in person; these transactions are difficult to track because of database limitations—currently, status; interactions; and contacts for international rights transactions on a large number of titles gets lost.
Julie Morris on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
Clear terminology for permissions and obligations associated with accessing a work— be it through a library, classroom (for course materials), software application, online repository, or other portal needs to be established and defined in a standard way so that the licensing environment (library, classroom, etc.) can treat works from multiple rights holders according to such permissions and obligations. This access is distinct from copyright held on the work and needs to be treated as such in metadata that is attached to a work. University presses, who regularly provide access to published works to students across a variety of platforms, have a particular need to see access better accounted for in rights data.
Julie Morris on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
Improve the flow of rights data among publishers, libraries, and library service providers. No single metadata standard is used among book publishers, libraries, and service providers to communicate rights and permissions data for library materials. Clear rights data is not being communicated to libraries: several libraries, both university-based and public, report a lack of consistent and accurate rights and permissions information for the content in their collections, inhibiting libraries from providing electronic access to a large portion of content and making library collection data difficult to manage. This is especially true for print works which libraries wish to digitize and make available to patrons or publicly.
Bill Rosenblatt on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
Higher education curriculum service providers (e.g. e-textbook services) would like to be able to offer course instructors the ability to compose single textbook volumes (whether in print or ebook) from materials sourced from multiple publications from one publisher or multiple publishers. For example, an instructor could assemble a custom physics textbook with a chapter on angular momentum from one publisher’s textbook, friction from another publisher’s textbook, gravity from another, etc., plus her own treatment of magnetic fields. One of the reasons why no one has been able to offer a scalable service of this type is the difficulty of licensing content from multiple higher ed publishers in a flexible and automated manner.
Bill Kasdorf on behalf of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
The user of a publication currently has little or no way to know what permissions and obligations associated with a publication given to her by a friend or checked out of a library. She is not the original purchaser so she has not acknowledged any purchase or licensing agreement. She may be aware of general copyright requirements, but there may be other permissions or obligations associated with using the publication that she needs to know.
This section lists the requirements arising from the use-cases catalogued in this document.
Rejected
Rejected
Rejected
Rejected
Rejected
Not a requirement
Not a requirement
Not a requirement
Not a requirement
Rejected
Rejected
Not a requirement for ODRL
Rejected
Not a requirement for ODRL
Not a requirement for ODRL
Rejected
Not a requirement for ODRL
Not a requirement for ODRL