Toward semantics‐aware management of intellectual property rights

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the advantages of semantics‐aware representation formalisms in the integration of digital rights management (DRM) infrastructures grounded on heterogeneous formats.

After discussing the notion of semantics‐aware IPR and its relationship with Semantic Web‐style metadata, we exemplify the advantages of adopting it by providing two different use cases. XML‐based DRMLs are mapped with a shared ontology‐based representation in such a way that dependencies between elements can be drawn.

Individual formalisms may take advantage of a semantics‐aware infrastructure to check consistency of DRM policies according to dependencies not explicit in the specification language. On the other hand, distinct formalisms can be integrated with each other according to fine‐grained translation mechanisms.

Inference procedures can pre‐process this knowledge base and derive implicit knowledge that can be used by programming logic in the actual enforcement of DRM policies.