A Semantic Web Approach to Digital Rights Management
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A Semantic Web approach to Digital Rights Management by Roberto García González Ph.D. Thesis Doctorate in Computer Science and Digital Communication Department of Technologies Advisor: Dr. Jaime Delgado Mercé Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, November 2005 Dipòsit legal: B.26401-2007 ISBN: 978-84-690-7821-1 A Rosa Acknowledgments Gracias Rosa, sin ti esta tesis no hubiese visto la luz. Gracias a mis padres, hermana, abuelos, tíos... siempre me habéis motivado a seguir. Recién acabada la presentación del proyecto final de carrera ya me preguntabais por lo que vendría des- pués. Gracias a mi director de tesis, Jaime Delgado, sobretodo por aquella recomendación a finales de 1999 sobre que me mirase algo llamado RDF... ahí empezó todo. I would also like to acknowledge the following people. Aldo Gangemi, Jos Lehmann, Carola Cate- nacci, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Daniela Tiscornia and Maria Teresa Sagri for their feedback during the Legal Modelling Seminar held in Rome on June 2005. John F. Sowa for his encouraging com- ment about the "State of the Art" part. And Adam Pease for his comments about the mapping to SUMO. Abstract In order to improve the management of copyright in the Internet, known as Digital Rights Manage- ment, there is the need for a shared language for copyright representation. Current approaches are based on purely syntactic solutions, i.e. a grammar that defines a rights expression language. These languages are difficult to put into practice due to the lack of explicit semantics that facilitate its im- plementation. Moreover, they are simple from the legal point of view because they are intended just to model the usage licenses granted by content providers to end-users. Thus, they ignore the copyright framework that lies behind and the whole value chain from creators to end-users. The contribution of this work is to apply a semantic approach based on web ontologies to Digital Rights Management. The main contribution is the development of a copyright ontology that puts this approach into practice. It models the copyright core concepts for creations, rights and the basic kinds of actions that operate on them. Altogether allows building a copyright framework for the complete value chain. The set of actions operating on content are the building blocks that combined cope with the complexity of the copyright domain. At the same time, their simplicity guarantees a high level of interoperability and evolvability. The resulting copyright modelling framework is flexible and complete enough to model many copyright scenarios, not just those related to the economic exploitation of content. Additionally, the ontology design and the selection of tools result in a straightforward imple- mentation. Rights are modelled as classes of actions, action patterns are modelled also as classes and concrete actions are modelled as instances. Then, to check if some right or license grants an action is reduced to check for class subsumption and instance classification, which are the main functionalities of Description Logic reasoners. These checks are guided by the modal operators implicit in some of the case roles used in the ontology. An additional contribution is to apply the same approach to the main rights expression lan- guages, which are based on syntactic solutions. For each of these initiatives, a web ontology has been developed that captures the language grammar but also formalises its implicit semantics. Thus, it is easier to develop tools for these languages and they can be integrated in the general framework of the Copyright Ontology. The integration produces benefits in both directions. On one hand, the copyright ontology can benefit from it because new requirements are detected an it can be evaluated against real world needs. On the other hand, the copyright ontology can con- tribute its formal semantics to these syntax-based initiatives. Contents Title Page ............................................... i Abstract ................................................ ix List of Figures ............................................ xvii List of Tables ............................................. xx 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Outline ............................................. 2 I State of the Art 4 2 Knowledge Representation 5 2.1 Tacit Knowledge ........................................ 5 2.2 Knowledge Sharing ...................................... 7 2.3 Information .......................................... 8 2.4 Knowledge Formalisation .................................. 8 2.5 Knowledge Representations ................................. 9 2.5.1 Principles ....................................... 10 2.5.2 Levels of representation ............................... 11 2.6 Logic .............................................. 12 2.6.1 Logic types ...................................... 13 2.7 Semantics ........................................... 15 2.7.1 Semiotics ........................................ 16 2.7.2 Sense and reference .................................. 16 2.7.3 Automatic semantics ................................. 18 2.8 Inference ............................................ 19 x Contents xi 2.8.1 Deduction ....................................... 19 2.8.2 Abduction ....................................... 22 2.8.3 Induction ....................................... 22 2.8.4 Analogy ........................................ 22 2.9 Ontology ............................................ 22 2.9.1 Upper Ontologies ................................... 24 2.10 KR Technologies ........................................ 26 2.10.1 Logic programming ................................. 26 2.10.2 Production systems .................................. 27 2.10.3 Semantic Networks .................................. 28 2.10.4 Description Logics .................................. 28 2.10.5 Conceptual Graphs .................................. 29 2.11 Knowledge into Practice ................................... 31 2.11.1 Knowledge Engineering ............................... 31 2.11.2 Knowledge Management .............................. 31 3 Web Technologies 32 3.1 Introduction .......................................... 32 3.2 Building blocks ........................................ 33 3.2.1 URI ........................................... 34 3.2.2 HTTP .......................................... 34 3.2.3 HTML ......................................... 35 3.3 Current situation ....................................... 35 3.3.1 Device proliferation scenario ............................ 35 3.3.2 Search engines scenario ............................... 36 3.3.3 Business scenario ................................... 37 3.3.4 Copyright scenario .................................. 37 3.4 Recent developments ..................................... 37 3.4.1 XML .......................................... 37 3.4.2 Web Services ..................................... 38 4 Semantic Web 42 4.1 Motivation ........................................... 43 4.2 Tendencies ........................................... 46 Contents xii 4.3 Built-in Semantics ....................................... 47 4.4 Explicit Semantics ....................................... 47 4.5 Semantic Web of Agents ................................... 49 4.6 Knowledge Representation ................................. 50 4.7 Semantic Web Principles ................................... 50 4.7.1 Everything identifiable is on the Semantic Web .................. 51 4.7.2 Partial information .................................. 51 4.7.3 Evolution ....................................... 51 4.7.4 Web of trust ...................................... 52 4.7.5 Minimalist design .................................. 52 4.7.6 Common Models ................................... 52 4.7.7 Rhizome metaphor .................................. 53 4.8 Semantic Web Architecture ................................. 54 4.8.1 URI and UNICODE ................................. 54 4.8.2 XML and Namespaces ................................ 55 4.8.3 RDF Model and Syntax ............................... 55 4.8.4 RDF Schema ...................................... 56 4.8.5 Ontology ........................................ 58 4.8.6 Rules .......................................... 59 4.8.7 Logic .......................................... 59 4.8.8 Proof .......................................... 60 4.8.9 Trust .......................................... 60 4.9 Semantic Web Services .................................... 61 5 Rights Expression Languages 63 5.1 Introduction .......................................... 63 5.1.1 Motivation ....................................... 64 5.1.2 Trusted Systems .................................... 65 5.1.3 DRM and the Law .................................. 65 5.2 Rights Expression Languages ................................ 66 5.2.1 History ......................................... 68 5.2.2 Using Rights Expression Languages ........................ 69 5.2.3 RELs Analysis ..................................... 69 Contents xiii 5.3 Creative Commons (CC) ................................... 73 5.3.1 Contract ........................................ 73 5.3.2 Control ......................................... 74 5.3.3 Data Elements ..................................... 74 5.4 Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) .......................... 77 5.4.1 Contract ........................................ 78 5.4.2 Control ......................................... 79 5.4.3 Data Elements ..................................... 79 5.5 MPEG-21 ...........................................